Beginning things has never been my forte. I sit here most days and think, "How do I start this? "What do I write down first?”. And of course, there are no real rules to follow other than the ones I set for myself. But still I always struggle.
Ending things, however, I’ve always been good at it. Not in the sense that they’re ever easy, but even when I write, I know how something will end. I know the last line and the words, and I build a world around them. I do it with my life too. Morbid as it sounds, it comes from a place of waiting for things to fall apart, armed with the knowledge that you always had a sense that they would.
Two years ago to this past week, I moved back to London from Amsterdam after 5 years here. I wasn’t sure how long it would be, but I knew it would be at least a year. I was excited, but I was also afraid. In my mind, going back to London felt like going backwards. Suddenly the life I’d been building here felt less tangible, like it was already slipping away.
I was desperate to memorialise my time or find something to hold onto. The night before I left, I wrote about it; how I felt to say goodbye to a place after so long. I wrote about everything that happened that night and in some way, everything that had come before it. You could call it a small essay, and in the spirit of this newsletter, another overture into the kind of writing I hope to share more of. I called it ‘two bodies’, for reasons I hope become clear. But I will leave that up to you to decide.
I was cycling to the gym, the route I always took, when I realised half the road had been sectioned off.
There had been an accident. A swarm of cyclists headed in my direction, against the usual run of traffic. Police vans bookended the road. Ambulances were hedged in. People in groups surrounded them – some moving, some still. A white tarpaulin lay on the ground, shaped by the weight of the body that lay beneath it.
I biked this route every day. I cycled along the same stretch of concrete that a body now cordoned off. I checked my phone and changed songs at that very intersection, knowing that the body on the ground could so easily have been mine.
I wondered what happened to that person. If their day started in the way any normal day does. The way that shock only exists when surprise fades from routine.
It was my last night in Amsterdam before I moved to London. I thought about my day; how it could be so normal and so different at the same time. Like the way somebody else can take a recipe you’ve made hundreds of times and still surprise you.
Today was all of those things. The people I’d seen, new friends and old. Breakfast, coffee, more coffee, beer, more beers. The route I cycled. All of it so indicative of the everyday. My every day. And yet I was spending my Saturday night alone at the gym; the first time I’d ever done this.
I thought about what I’d seen on the way and about endings and beginnings. How a moment can change your life, how we never really know anything but right now. I wondered how it could be that both my body, and the one that lay on the road could share so much; two bodies once of the world they knew so well, soon to lose the habits that formed them. How both bodies were at the precipice of change.
At the gym, I craved routine. The same steps, the same weights. I picked myself the first locker in the row because one seemed like the most normal number. The start of a sequence that makes sense. The only place you can begin when you don’t know where to.
But my routine wasn’t the same, if only because I knew that everything else wasn’t about to be. I looked around the gym and saw people I’d never seen before. I tried to imagine what had happened in their days to lead them here. If they were like me, thrown off their balance and trying to hold on, or looking for some way to fill their nights. I wondered how, if change was so universal, why did it feel so lonely?
My mind drifted back to the accident. I wondered if our two bodies shared more already. One pair of eyes closed to the world forever, the other pair closed to what it didn’t want to see. That if I’d timed my day differently, we’d switch places and they’d be writing this now.
I cycled back home thinking about this. The fragility of daily life. The sway of time. The irrevocability of chance. How even after moving between five countries, my parents still worried about whether I'd be ok.
I passed by the site of the accident again. On one side, a crumpled-up bicycle. The other, a vacant car with a policeman inspecting it; at once looking for traces of the car’s owner, in every move erasing them.
I crossed the bridge I always did, the canals reflecting the promenade overlooked by a windmill. I lingered on the words a friend once said to me: how reflections have a way of letting us see what we want to see, not what we do. I saw a city fading in definition, not the one I still lived in.
This had been home for the longest time. Perhaps even for the first time. For five years, I’d been cutting out a picture of a city that I could see myself in. Five years later, that hadn’t changed, even if I had to say goodbye for now.
I thought about the wordlessness of belonging. Its warmth, its fullness; a luminous gradual feeling, like your eyes adjusting to the morning after a long night. Suddenly it’s all around you; an inescapable, cocooning embrace.
Amsterdam gave me that. I still remember my first weekend in the city. The first days of spring, sat on the back of my partner’s bike as we sped down a canal-cut road. It was about 6 pm. The crushed orange light of the sunset grazed the gabled buildings, while the water shimmered, entirely still. I can recall a calmness and a moment of total happiness that I’d rarely experienced. There I was: quiet, present, alive. One love blooming, another fading. I couldn’t know then that it was the city, and not the man biking me through it, that would stay with me. Perhaps that was the beauty of it all.
I cycled on, away from the accident, thinking about all I’d seen and felt from the seat of my bicycle. I thought about my body – how it was already splitting into two. One here in Amsterdam, the one soon to leave it behind. And as I did, I watched as the city recoloured itself in all the shades I’d seen it in. The same familiar sights but weighted with the past.
No building was a building but a memory. That was where I stayed my first week when I moved here. This was where I got drenched in the rain. This was where I took shelter. That was when I thought I was in love with him. This was the place where somebody died. This was the city I was trying to remember. This is the place I called home.
things i’m talking about
I was having to write up a piece about collecting and video games for a freelance commission and I got swept back up into the Nintendo 64 life I grew up in. I’ve also been huge on lofi music for a while now; you’ll often find me writing one of these out with that playing in the background. Which is all to say, I stumbled upon these ambient throwback vaporwave compilations and they take me back to simpler times - recommend them for when you’re working and staring out the window longingly like I do.
been listening to Abby Holliday a lot recently, this one’s been hitting home – give me a self-flagellating indie girl any day!
i know twitter (it will never be X to me) is dying but it’s still the most unhinged of all social media and for that I will always love it. a little snippet which I connected with:
I’m currently watching VEEP (a decade behind everyone) and just watched this scene and there is truly nothing I enjoy more than insult comedy mixed with satire. a little too close to american politics right now but that gives it extra appeal.