On: Dreams, Fate, and Amsterdam
I’d never been in love before.
I’d never been in love before.
It’s two summers ago and I’m half-asleep on my friend’s couch in Amsterdam.
I got in just hours earlier, on the kind of midsummer evening where the warm wind blows ripples across slivered canals. Where young people laugh outside wine bars and an old couple dances over a bridge. Where, around twilight, I walk past a cute guy who smiles and stares. Who my friends greet in passing; who looks at me as he waves. Who walks away, still looking, as we lose each other to the midsummer night.
My friends and I are drunk - off that spirit of summer, if not the wine - when we get back to their airy canal house. Our laughs ring across the high ceilings, whose windows we open, letting the wind in - with its drumming of boats and whirring of bikes and quiet waves lapping, always, gently upon the shore.
“I really think you’d love it here,” my friend Mark says, when it’s just us left. “I mean, you could meet all my friends, we can help you find a flat and a job…” He trails off, his eyes shining with that kind of hope that takes courage to speak aloud. “I mean, I’d love it if you stayed.”
I think before speaking, feeling the power of how I respond. How something definitive, said right now, really could change my fate. He sees that in my eyes - the fear I have in hoping for something I’m not sure is even possible - a life that fits
“That’s so kind…” I start to say, swallowing as I weigh my feelings. “I think it’s really possible,” I finally reply, my cautious smile bellied by the excitement in his bright blue eyes.
We talk some logistics before he says, tentatively, with a smile, “You know, maybe you’ll find love here, too.” He knows about my patchy history here - my hookups that lead to nothing, the half-baked relationships that stop before they start. “You know,” I reply, “I actually had that feeling tonight, too.” I don’t mention his friend from the street, whose lingering gaze I feel in me, still.
“You should’ve seen Pride a few weeks ago.” He smiles, shows me photos - fun, crowded, crazy - while we talk until my eyes start to close and his girlfriend starts to text and then I’m half-asleep on his couch, dreaming for the first time in weeks.
I’m in an old apartment - here, in Amsterdam - with big half-moon windows that look out on the inky waters of a softly lit, tree-lined canal. There’s a candlelit table and a man in a black t-shirt. I don’t want to remember any of his physical details - I’m not sure that I can, even - but I can so vividly remember how he made me feel. He smiled and our hearts were like one. I had the sensation that I was living a dream - a dream I didn’t know was inside of me; I start to cry, embarrassed by this, at first, before falling into his arms - and letting him fall into mine, too - in a moment of connection so wholly complete that I’d never felt it before or since. That I couldn’t imagine existed, maybe for others if not for me - until it happened, in a dream within a dream.
I wake up the next morning to a knotted up stomach and dried tears on my cheeks. My anxiety’s spiking - that these feelings - is it love? - can exist - here, in Amsterdam - for me - is just too much to bear this morning. Mark’s going to work, knows something’s wrong, says that he hopes I’ll think more about our conversation last night - that I’m welcome to stay as long as I’d like - before he’s out the door, heading to Delft. Marin - his girlfriend - is right behind, with a smile, a hug, a, “Just do whatever you want today,” “Cook dinner if you’d like,” and “Is everything ok?” Before she, too, heads out for the day. Léonie, our other friend, calls and I burst, telling her everything. “I know this sounds crazy - I mean it was literally a dream - but I don’t know what to do.” “Meet me for coffee,” she says, “You can just journal and I’ll do my work and then we can walk around and talk about it.”
And so we do, and an American woman sits down beside us, telling her friend about how she moved here for love seven years ago. That it was the best decision she’s made, before we’re walking around and my stomach’s loosening as I realize I can’t move now, that if I feel this way in a year - after I go everywhere else I want to go - then I’ll come back, nothing will change.
Even as we both know that everything will change. That I did, in fact, feel this way a year later - stronger, even, for the time and the distance - that my carefully laid plans to move got derailed by breaking my leg. That I wound up on Avenida Amsterdam in Mexico City, instead - that I’m still single, in a romantically loveless life, but for that dream that now haunts me like a nightmare - that berates me, late at night, for missing my chance - that the universe shouted at me to stay and I left, as I always do - as I’ll do even now, when I go for the summer next week - carried by a wind that echoes of dreams within dreams.
