Four or five days later I was having breakfast in the Neumarkt Starbuck’s in Cologne with my boss. (Just a couple weeks ago I realized my first job is a gay writing job that I didn’t actually actively apply for. How am I ever going to top this?) I was sleepy, because although my parents live close to the German border, I had to travel for anything between an hour and a half and two hours to get from door to Starbuck’s. That depended a little on the subway transfer, but for three days during the Gay Games Cologne I did it every morning and every evening. I am nineteen, and I didn’t have a press pass because I was supposed to be in Eastern Europe, but I tried to manage as best as I could. I was nervous at first, then I was exuberant, and then I was just tired. I watched sports I couldn’t care less about (like beach volley) and cheered for the Dutch people. I talked to people I didn’t know were important. I stumbled through translating English to German even though all my German gets mangled up with Swedish these days. I told some German guy we didn’t have any transgender magazines and while I said it, I felt incredibly stupid. I watched a black father and a white father feed their toddler daughter, all smile and curls and terrible twos. I developed a temporary fondness for cheerleading, and got soaked in the rain to watch it.

I don’t ever blog about my job because it feels strange, and also, because there’s not much to talk about. I do it from behind my computer and I often cram it in between vocabulary revisions, episodes of The Vampire Diaries, reader texts, or dishes. When I still used to live with my parents I never started writing before my parents went to bed because they didn’t know anything about it for I think pretty much the first year. But on the second day my father drove me to Cologne and he went back with our magazine, to give to his lesbian colleagues.

Anyway, when I was in that Starbuck’s having breakfast and being sleepy and silent, there were sportsmen around, and I could feel the buzz.

When I’d just admitted to myself I did actually like girls, first I had all this anxiety building up in me that only got released a bit when I came out to my online friend D the English major, then to my online friend J the English major (who is at my uni now), and then to E the People and Bussines Management major in December of 2007. Then I started worrying a bit about politics, major events, and the like, and the first thing that happened was 15 year old Lawrence King got shot by his classmate on February 12^th, 2008. I came out to my parents that night, which ended in drama from my mother’s side, who ran up the stairs, shouted a couple nasty things, and slammed my parent’s bedroom behind her. My father responded with silence, although I do remember him telling my mother to let me just speak. I didn’t have a laptop back then, and it took me two days before I allowed myself to be downstairs beside breakfast and dinner. That’s when I read about the shooting online, and I felt powerless.

The second thing that happened was Proposition 8 in California. I was up all night the morning of the elections, watching live television until the wee hours, and I was up at six the following day when Obama spoke live on my radio. (Which, by the way, sits abandoned on a closet in my old bedroom in the South.) I knew Prop 8 was going on, but the Dutch press pretty much ignored it, so again I had to wait ‘till the evening, and subsequently the next day when I had some time off between classes to head to a computer, to find out if they’d finished counting. Prop 8, as we all know, passed. Again, I felt powerless.

Meanwhile, my mother was still avoiding ‘the topic’. At one point she said, ‘do we really have to talk about it all the time?’ although I hated bringing it up and never actually did. She referred to me as a dyke while we were playing a board game at Christmas 2008, and again two times after. She once said I must like purple because I am bisexual, I would never have any kids although I wanted to be a mom when the other kids wanted to drive fire trucks, and when we were painting my room in the summer of 2009, she asked how you could possibly know the difference between just a girl friend and a girl you like. Which for me is, ‘well people I’m just friends with can be really pretty as well, but people I like set my stomach on fire with their eyes‘. (Instead of saying that, I asked her how she knew with guys she met.) I am still hopelessly teaching her not to say ‘homofiel’ (homophile) but ‘homosexueel’ (homosexual) and not to correct herself when saying ‘pedofiel’ (pedophile) and replace it with ‘pedosexueel’ (pedosexual). ‘Pedosexual’ is a term coined by Dutch press (the bastards) and this political party who is banned from running in elections but who wants to ‘take away the stigma’. Well they can choke in their stigma, I don’t want them referred to with a civil description. I know I’m being childish, but I have my reasons.

At school, although I wasn’t targeted specifically because nobody ever knows I’m queer, there were definitely taunts directed at no one in particular, and when I spoke out to my English teacher about it, she refused to take it a level up. I was afraid to talk to the guy one level up if only because my self esteem was dwindling. I fell into depression, I cut my knee with my gilette in the shower, I stared at my wrists for an entire weekend and listened to brilliant Andrea Gibson on repeat. I wrote ‘this will never be over until I am over’ in my diary and texted my friend J the English major the lines ‘tonight I wanna slit my wrists, hold my blood to God’s lips and say taste this’. She replied, ‘Don’t. You. Dare.’ and told me everything would be fine as soon as both of us would be at uni in Amsterdam, because at that time she lived across the country. She saved me. I never told anyone this. Then I wrote a lengthy e-mail to my History teacher about why my grades were almost sub-zero (lowest point reached with a 2.1 out of 10) and I managed not to cry when he invited me to talk about it after class one day. He raged at the insecure little boys in my class who dared to say about my new gay headmaster that he should’ve never been allowed to hold a position that serves as an example at a school.

They made fun of my teacher, but I adored him for it. He shot me a look, and I smiled back, and that’s something I will always remember. There’d never been a teacher who actively looked out for me, from the Arts teacher at thirteen who laughingly asked me ‘you do like things quiet, don’t you?’ while I was fighting back tears because no one wanted to cooperate with me on the groups project, to the PE teacher who asked me, ‘you don’t do sports, do you?’ although I swam twice a week, to the Social Sciences teacher who told me that he hadn’t believed I was intelligent before I managed to get into senior year of vwo. Teachers didn’t like me because I didn’t work or because I was apparently stupid, and when they did know I didn’t really have to work, they simply tolerated me. It was so strange at uni to hear my language prof say she really thought I worked for it and was a good student.

Sobutanyway, I spent entire afternoons in the library writing. I read British newspapers between old men and rich uptown women because I didn’t want to go home. I stopped studying. I graduated with decent grades because I am stubborn. Then I got asked to write for the website, to which the most evident trace by now has been removed. I want this site to go down anonymously, and me on the website has been becoming increasingly non-anonymously, if there exists such a thing.

I was in Cologne on August 5^th (I honestly don’t know these dates by heart, but there’s always Wikipedia), surrounded by gay people, when we had all just heard Prop 8 had been overturned by district court Judge Walker. And I felt that buzz for a brief moment, sleepy-headed, while discovering frappucinnos. I realized: I am no longer powerless.

Since I found my way around the internet, I have been active in it far more than most of my friends. I was on message boards, I wrote fiction, I was addicted to an mmorpg for a while. I started blogging when I was thirteen years old, and when the gay issues became clear to me in 2007, I started blogging about those. Feverishly, almost. And I now have a voice.

Forget about all the nasty things my mother said. She was never raised to be any better, no one expected it of her. At some point she started trying, and we get along fine now. I haven’t crossed the hurdle of ‘first girl I’m dating’ yet, but we got through ‘first boy I’m dating’ pretty alright. Forget about high school, and moron teachers, and library safe havens. Forget about me crying on the toilet of an Italian restaurant in my boyfriend jeans and tanktop, my grandpa cardigan (ordered from the H&M men’s department, yay online shops!) flung towards my friends M the former Swedish major and M the Norwegian major, because my friend S the Swedish major had said something tactless about people from bad backgrounds. That’s a whole ‘nother topic, my unhappy bus driving father, the tiny apartment I grew up in until we bought our house, my mother who walked around the house crying for a couple months and said she wasn’t good for anything when I was nine and I used to crawl in bed with her the nights  my father was out working.

At the place I am now in my life, I’m afraid I will forget about that. The good they’ve done for me, my numerous cousins who never got ahead in life and are now doomed to live it over with their own children, that I used to love my grandfather before he turned into a manipulating monster. I’m afraid I will become the kind of person who takes her work home, travels far, and in the end forgets to return to that rural South of that tiny drowning country by the North Sea. But if I work hard enough, I won’t.

I want to go far. That is something the three of us, my parents and me, have always worked for. No matter what, I will get a university degree, I will repay my by then humongous, ginormous, awfully large dept to the government, I will never forget those afternoons as a kid learning English, because I will remember that it will be the foundation of my success. It’s only now that I have a basis in Swedish that I notice how hard it is to learn the finer things that I have never thought twice about in my second language. Why is it ‘to know by heart’ instead of Dutch ‘to know from out of your head’? Why is it ‘on the bus’ instead of Dutch ‘in the bus?’. Why is ‘the police’ plural, when do you say ‘badly’ instead of ‘bad’, what is the difference between ‘good’ and ‘well’, when do you drop the ‘the’ before ‘government’?

I did have a press pass, once. It was the ILGA-Europe conference in The Hague last autumn. I was probably the youngest person there and it was amazing. I have ten more credits to go before I complete my first year of my bachelor’s in Scandinavian Studies. I have figured out this year that I’m more intrested in Media Studies than in General Linguistics, which is fine, because you gotta figure that out one time in life. I just moved from Hoofddorp at the other end of the airport, where I lived for almost two years, to near the Vondelpark in Amsterdam. It’s a giant flat with a lot of short stay international students, which is brilliant. And although I want to remember the bad times, I want to remember the good times just as vividly. I want to see what more life has in store for me. What other victories I will be able to celebrate, be it small ones like a minor or big ones like Prop 8.

I am spreading my wings. Just you watch.

—

Quick note: I will only disappear from *this blog*, not from the internet. Some of you know who I am, in which case you will know where to find me. The last couple posts have been pre-scheduled and I never actually checked back on WordPress. I have outlived this platform, this fake name, and these long-winded rants. There are too much things you can learn about me on here, however, I have realised there are also a million things you don’t know about me. Did you know my parents and me have always celebrated New Year’s in front of the tv in our pajamas, complaining we don’t know what regular people do on those occassions? I once slept through it with my cousin J? That my favourite dish comes from Groningen, the province I was born in, and contains bacon, and that I became a vegetarian in October last year? Which, frankly, is a bit of a problem?

You didn’t. Because you don’t know me. And I like to keep the other million things to myself.

Way to keep up with a New Year’s tradition. Death Cab for Cutie has always been the start of my new year. And I never had any resolutions.

Today I have one, though: I will stop pretending to be somebody I’m not. The past week I have been back home with my parents, and I realised I will be back home with my parents every Christmas until there is no longer a ‘back home with my parents’. Which makes this one week seem all the more significant. I have met up with old friends and they spoke about their business related majors and it never occured to them I might have something interesting to add to the conversation. I ran into all kinds of people I keep running into in Maastricht, people that I graduated with in 2007, people that I graduated with in 2009, heaps and heaps of unintresting people who keep running in the same old circles.

They still think I would lash out at them when they say something slightly awkward about gay people. They still let their eyes drift towards me for that three seconds it takes to see if I’m okay with what they’re saying, even though I have long stopped requesting approval of anyone when it comes to my sexuality. If they say something that offends me, I will retort, and I know from experience they will apologize more often than necessary – a habit I have only picked up in the past year or so.

I went to a gay bar on the fourth day of the university introductory week with J the English major and a bunch of people I didn’t know and no longer know the names of. I did so without checking with my group leaders if it was okay if I skipped the official program for the night, and the day after I told a couple girls I had gone to a gay bar. Although I still never actually utter the sentence ‘so I’m bisexual, just lettin’ you know’ (or any of the variations on that) all that often, they could’ve asked me then and I would’ve answered with the truth. They just didn’t ask. It was, ‘I went to a gay bar’, and then it was, ‘oh, okay’.

Everything that happened after that are things my friends in Maastricht have never inquired to know. Some of the things (Gay Games Cologne, Amsterdam Canal Parade, ILGA-Europe conference) they have actively ignored to the point that when I say I was working so of course I could answer my e-mail all day long, because I *need* a computer with functioning internet to get anything done, I don’t think they really understand what I mean.

When this post goes up I would have been in Amsterdam, partying with M the Meds major, E the People and Bussiness Management major, and D the Pedagogy major. Then at the last moment, everyone cancelled and it ended with me on the top stairs, long pauses in our phone conversation, and M changing it to partying in Maastricht. The last time I partied in Maastricht with just her, I got all the creepy men and she didn’t think about helping me out because all the boys who study Economics and wear suits on a night out were so much more intresting. (Sorry, but give me a sexually confused smoker who’s flunking completely in uni over that any time. At least he was honest.) I hardly slept that night, instead sweating and sliding in and out of nightmares, which also happened a few times when we were on holiday last summer and I can’t talk to her about it.

I was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, my feet dangling downwards by the time she said ‘then I’ll speak to you later’ before abruptly hanging up. (After which J the Danish major invited me to him and his girlfriend’s, but that’s all the way in The Hague.) An hour later, she asked per Facebook, ‘Would you still drop off my usb stick?’. My parents live fifteen kilometers away from anything remotely intresting, including her. I will not spend an hour in public transport just to drop off a usb stick.

I’m done with it. Done with Maastricht, with not being in the conversation. With trying to keep up friendships with people who don’t understand me for who I am – and this has in fact very little to do with the ‘awkward gay comments’ issue. They don’t know how my personality has evolved since all of us graduated. We’ll probably survive, M and me, E and me, D and me. But I’m not going to be bound by them any longer.

I’m done with pretending to be someone I’m not. That’s my resolution.

Good morning, everybody. Make it all worth it. Make it all so very worth it. Never stop standing on your toes to reach those top shelves.

love,

“Gwen”.

–

‘Cause even at your worst
You are fucking incredible
It comes honest
So return to yourself
Even if you’re already there
‘Cause no matter where you go
Or how hard you try
Or what you do
The only person you ever gonna get to be
And I know it
Thank God
Is-

- Buddy Wakefield, The Information Man

The doctor reaches up into a cupboard and slides a booklet towards me over the table. ‘Play it safe’, it says.

“Because the pill works against unplanned pregnancies, but not against stds. And you live in Amsterdam, right?”

The doctor had previously told me he had studied in Amsterdam too, at the VU in Buitenveldert. In the booklet, I can see it from in the chair, is a condom, the way we used to get condoms in high school every several years in booklets like this one. Probably earlier print versions of this exact booklet. My point being: I know stuff. I’m nineteen.

“Yes doctor, so when I finally do get a girlfriend, I’ll be sure to use a condom and she won’t be able to knock me up!”

And I slide out of there, all purple and skinny jeans, leaving the doctor with his silly booklet in which the word ‘lesbian’ is mentioned exactly once.

-

Okay, so I’m not gay, and I didn’t say that, and I don’t mind having a condom that’s fit for use until July and apparently has ‘structure for maximum stimulation’. Which sounds kind of gross. I did however for a split second want to ask him if those booklets come with dental dams as well.

And to think I had an appointment for my persistent headaches.

“But,” I suddenly remember. “They have broccoli pizzas!”

J gets excited like the kid he sometimes is and grabs my upper arm to cuddle it. Y, N and V the Dutch major are all surprised, because obviously he doesn’t normally act like that. I grin and tell him he should have let me finish before.

*

We’re on our way to our favourite Italian restaurant, as J jumps into a puddle with all his height and weight into it. I get wet and there’s a leaf stuck on my jeans. Y is shocked, as she is often, and N doesn’t know what to make of it. As I get over my own surprise, I chase J down the street and try to get a hold of him. He holds my wrists and is stronger than me, as all boys are. “Dammit, you’re way too strong,” I say, having never tried to attack him before. “I love you too,” he answers, and has me in a hug before I get out of my attack-mood.

*

“I no longer go on holidays with my parents.” I tend to forget I get uncomfortable right after bringing up my parents. Or anything about my giant family.
“I only go on holidays with my mother anymore.”

He regularly rebuilds his mothers car because it used to be his fathers car. “Mijn dooie pappa,” he said, not perfectly translatable to “my dead dad”. I’m not used to people talking about their dead parents like this, before, usually it wasn’t talked about at all. He says he doesn’t feel like he misses anything, but the topic is about as recurring in conversation as the Foo Fighters were with L the European Studies major. It’s a weird connection, but it’s the only one I know of that makes sense in the context of this blog. His dead dad is always at the edges of his conscience, whether he admits to it or not. One day I’ll learn how to respond to this.

*

“I still want to buy an entire bottle of coke and drink all of it.” We’re on our way back to the railway station, N, J and me having to take the same train.

“There’s a AH to go on Amsterdam Central,” I answer.

“Yeah. I probably wouldn’t go home and finish phonology though.” He told me he’d started on phonology on Monday morning, but in fact it turned out he hadn’t really done anything for it yet.

“You’d go home, drink your coke, and listen to Beatsteaks or something.”

Silence. “Why do you know me so well?”

*

When did this shift happen. At home, there’s a one-sentence message on my Facebook wall from M the Meds major. A few days ago she posted pictures of some ‘weekend in Paris’ with her new boyfriend W. I honestly had no idea they were going on a trip to Paris. (For any Americans out there: from where I grew up, Paris is four hours by car and not much more than that by train. It sounds extravagant, but it’s really just as far away as the Dutch islands in the North Sea.)

I knew I was sliding away from M about halfway through our holidays when we were sitting at the bus stop in beautiful Bologna with our groceries and we didn’t have any conversation for more than an hour (the bus came once every two hours) because she was listening to her mp3 player. I didn’t know I was sliding away from her towards J.

Or perhaps I did. But I didn’t realise exactly how this would happen. I thought my sliding away from M would take years, and my sliding towards J had nothing really to do with that. But I guess it’s true what my mother told me all along, we all get different friends once we’re in our separate universities in our separate cities. What I hope for us is that there won’t be any fuss. I’m done with fuss, was done with fuss at fifteen. Was done with fuss when I doubted whether I should help E the General Linguistics major with picking up her headphones as we walked out of the same tram to our respective classes. She was wearing heels. She also has a five-year relationship, so that ship is pretty much sailed.

It was somewhere between the puddle incident and realising nobody else knew who his girlfriend was (although they all know her) I understood exactly what spot J is beginning to take up in my life. And it’s not like it would be with a girl – I don’t spell everything out that happens to me. I used to spell everything out to M the Meds major I used to be able to talk about and she used to listen patiently and ask perceptive questions. But I’ve managed to create what I felt like I missed out on since leaving primary school: a ‘boy-girl’ friendship that’s more of a ‘boy-boy’ friendship. And then for a very big part it’s also not, because I’m pretty sure that if any two boys would be like he is with his female friends it would be considered very gay.

How do I explain this?

*

“I hate phonetics. I hate that woman and I hate the homework and I hate how much time I spend on failing it.”

“Yup. But it’s going to be alright,” he says.

“That’s your answer to everything,” I mutter unnapreciatively.

“If you drop the course, you can drink coffee with  me on Wednesday afternoons.”

I throw him a look. “No, that’s a great reason.”

“Want a hug?” He’s as tall as me, his tiny not naturally blonde curls against my cheek. I want so badly for us to be like this in decades to come. I want him to be a phone call away when I have my first child. Or when I am freaking out about what to pack to some other continent to bring my first child home. Whichever of those options, that have always both been present in my mind, is the one that is going to happen. I will call (ordered by likelihood of him living there) Denmark, or Norway, or Holland, or Germany, from wherever I will live then, and nervously squeak through a phone that I will no longer be slightly afraid of using. I’m too young to envision this, well screw that, I’m envisioning it as we speak.

*

On the other end of the line, a scooter drives by. “What were the chapters we had to read? ‘Cause I had to work until now.” I imagine him standing outside ‘the big blue box’ at ten pm, the Ikea in a different city either of us lives in, in a different world from me. With my current workload, I couldn’t get a job. It would be G Without A Life. Sometimes, I feel like it leaves J without a life as well.

Two hours later, my phone accidentally calls him because he’s the last incoming call and I’m not altogether accustomed to my touch screen yet. “Are you done with phonology yet? I’m not, because I got home and made dinner at eleven, and then L called because she’d spilled water over her laptop, and now we’re here.” I tell him I’m done with phonology, and I didn’t mean to call him, but I was just getting into bed. “Excuse accepted. Good night!”

*

“Do you want more chocolate?”
“I’m nauseous.”
“But if I eat all this I’ll get nauseous too.”

We’re in ‘the bear pit’ in our university building. Above us are the stairs to the first and second floor hovering in mid-air, stairs that can take you no further, so from the second floor up you always have to take a different flight or one of the many stairs that just go one floor up. It’s really the closest you can get to studying in Hogwarts. (Except for that one girl who used to major in English and Norwegian and is now in Oxford. But nothing beats Oxford in anything.) Getting to the sixth floor without getting lost is a menace, which is why we have our wooden elevators with electrical box ladies telling you on which floor you’ve landed. Most of the time when I’m looking for someplace I haven’t been before, I do it by trial and error and a general sense of where I might be at that time. And don’t get me started on getting to the entrance of the library on the first floor when you’re already on the first floor, but on the wrong side of the building – you will have to go either one floor up or one floor down before getting anywhere closer to your destination.

I’m lying on my side, my monthly headache throbbing, and accept a tiny piece of chocolate. I’ve heard that caffeine can bring about headaches, and I already have a monthly migraine attack, so I stopped drinking coke and reserve tea for the times when I really can’t go without it any longer. (Or when I’m freezing to the bone.) But chocolate, this time, is allowed. Both of us just flunked a phonology test.

Just for a second I close my eyes and before I know it, his face is all up in mine, his cheek against mine. I don’t immediately sense the importance of the moment, but I understand it now. M was always about tough love, and in the end, she thought many things I did or liked laughable. And J is a boy which, my short-lasting romance with L taught me, is still a tricky gender to be around, to get close to, to raise expectations with for yourself. (To be clear: it really was me who expected me to behave a certain way around L. He was just a nice guy.) The thing about J is that I don’t have to raise expectations for myself with him. I’m just gonna be me, and he’s just gonna be him, and he’s gonna be all physical, but there’s no bigger meaning to it. Well okay, deep breath, I’m gonna say it: it’s not sexual. His girlfriend L is doing her semester in Norway and he texts and e-mails her constantly. The thought he might ever become ‘more than friends’ is ridiculous, and something I’m probably only adding because in my old circle of friends in Maastricht, I can’t mention any boy more often than once before they ask me if I’m interested in them. It’s as ridiculous an assumption as that I might think of J this way. (And just because all the signs are pointing in this direction anyway, let me tell you that as I’m typing this, it’s been seven weeks since I saw any of them in Maastricht and I don’t really miss them.)

J is the kind of person who hugs everybody. Well, everybody female. I don’t think I know any boys he is good friends with, although I’m sure there must be a couple, it seems to be some alternative straight girls and an enviable amount of gay girls. Because of his ADD, he is about the most impulsive person I know, and that kind of eliminates any borders he might have on the cuddling-front. All the borders I have. That’s good. More importantly, it’s safe.

Because of the time of night I’m writing this, I’m keen to elaborate, about Mat, whom I lost, about M the Meds major, whom I am almost consciously cutting out of my life, about all kinds of things. But I won’t. L said it made sense if I didn’t trust anyone ‘anymore’, like I had trusted anyone before it happened, which is something he of course couldn’t know. Of course, that was a different kind of distrust; I was and still am the kind of person who wants to solve everything by herself.

Sobutanyway – I also stopped trusting myself. And I need people like J who are just there without further explanations to make me able to rebuild the trust I used to have in myself.

When we get out of the building and he’s off to a different one for a class I already passed, and he’s taking for the third time, he lays his head on my shoulder. As he sighs and we stand there side by side, I ruffle his hair. Note that the times I’ve spontaneously hugged a friend, ever,  can probably be counted on two hands. Most of my friends are girls, and before I knew I was gay I was uncomfortable around them for reasons unclear. After I figured it out, I was always worried somehow they would find it uncomfortable, or they would think I meant something different, even though they clearly are the most awesome friends anyone could have and it was only ever really me who thought those things. I wonder if I’m growing, as a person.

“Okej hej!” he says, and we split directions. I wonder how people see us.

*

So at what time do you have class tomorrow? I text sometime past midnight. He will still be up. Just found out via Facebook L has a girlfriend, and because his ex was always his ex, even still in June of this year, I’m the meaningless nothing in between the ex and the new girlfriend. I don’t feel angry or betrayed or whatever, not really. I mean, I’ve felt more angry and more betrayed with other people in the past.

I know this is not it and I know I really don’t care about how he specifically has a new girlfriend. It is just how he was the first person who I ever let get close to me, so that’s why this is still mildly important in my mind. That’s a simple fact of life. What I do feel angry about is that I know I’m not ready for that. I’m not ready to get all tangled up in someone. It’s not easy for me to let my guard down, and when I do, it’s not easy for me to let go, even though on the outside it might seem like you’re miles away from where my mind and heart are. It’s a big step, so with L, it was a big step to even start thinking about letting my guard down, and although I have no regrets about it, my heart is still mending. I wish I was one of those guys who always breathe ‘I’m not in it for the long run’ so I could live a little while I’m mending, but alas, I actually do fall for people.

We (J and me, that is, I don’t ever see L anymore and have no intention of doing so ever again in my life, ever! – you get the point) arrange for lunch the next day, creating for both of us a reason to attend class (I’ve been sloppy on the Swedish Language Acquisition 1 & 3 front) and he is all hugs and “Yes, but everything will be alright”, and conversation like it is with boys when you don’t try to make it complicated. Girl conversation is a lot about stories that have feelings in them. Boy conversation is simple and neat, like a freshly made bed. It clears the clutter in my mind.

*

“Han är väl snygg, tror du det inte också?” This is the Swedish translation of what J said in Danish about the guy behind the counter at the pasta place at Amsterdam Central. It is how I remember it, because my mind renders everything Danish or Norwegian into Swedish. He’s kind of cute, don’t you agree? Literally. I turn my head, smile, and think, yay for straight men who say other men are cute.

*

And there we were, in the same two seats we were the Friday before, and the Friday before that. And the Wednesdays in between. And only a few more weeks to go, because he’s not taking the class that comes after the midterm week. I’m not sure what the label of ‘best friend’ means at our age. Me nineteen, him twenty-two. I’d recently drawn the conclusion it was possible to have several. It’s a world of mystery for me. I’m no longer sure I want to throw around words like that.

He puts his ‘Iceland gloves’ into his bag. Green, black, pink. I put my new H&M gloves in my bag. Blue. It’s too early for my Iceland gloves (dark grey, black, light grey), they’re too warm. In fact, it’s too early for gloves altogether, in October. Both of us know that.

We’re ready. Phonology, bring it on.

*

I’m ready. World, bring it on.

Wanted to share two parts of it. But since I don’t have the English version because they were sold out (damn it), if you don’t speak Dutch, go and buy it yourself! Or go learn Dutch. But buying the version in your language is much less time consuming. And cheaper.

This is for the families like mine in which they could find a genetic marker for depression. The trouble with becoming older is that you start to see patterns. The trouble with becoming older in my family is that those patterns are denied because much of the occurences I base my patterns on are denied. But I was there. I have seen them falling. I have seen us falling.

—

ik: maar waarom ik? ik bedoel, wat zie je in mij?
tiny: jij hebt een hart, will. je laat het zelfs af en toe heel even zien. dat zie ik in jou. en ik zie dat je me nodig hebt.

ik schud mijn hoofd.

ik: snap je het dan niet? ik heb niemand nodig.
tiny: dat betekent alleen maar dat je mij nog harder nodig hebt.

het is zo duidelijk voor mij.

ik: jij bent niet verliefd op mij. jij bent verliefd op het idee dat ik je nodig heb.
tiny: wie zei dat ik ergens verliefd op was? ‘heel ontzettend gek op ben’, zei ik.

dan stopt hij. zwijgt hij even.

tiny: zo gaat het altijd. het gaat altijd min of meer zo.
ik: sorry.
tiny: en ze zeggen ook altijd ‘sorry’.
ik: ik kan dit niet, tiny.
tiny: je kunt best, maar je wilt niet. je wilt gewoon niet.

het is net of ik het niet met hem uit hoef te maken, omdat hij dit gesprek al in zijn hoofd heeft gevoerd. ik zou opgelucht moeten zijn dat ik niks hoef te zeggen. maar ik voel me alleen maar lulliger.

ik: jij kunt er niks aan doen. ik kan nou eenmaal niks voelen.
tiny: o nee? voel je op dit moment echt niks? helemaal niks?

ik wil tegen hem zeggen: niemand heeft me ooit geleerd hoe ik met dit soort dingen moet omgaan. zou loslaten niet pijnloos moeten zijn als je nooit hebt geleerd iets vast te houden?

tiny: dan ga ik nu maar.

en ik blijf. ik blijf hier op de schommel zitten terwijl hij wegloopt. ik blijf zwijgen als hij in zijn auto stapt. ik blijf zitten als ik de auto hoor starten en wegrijden. ik blijf ongelijk hebben, omdat ik niet weet hoe ik me door de doornhaag van mijn eigen hoofd moet werken om te komen bij wat het ook is wat ik hoor te doen. ik blijf hetzelfde, en hetzelfde, en hetzelfde, tot ik eraan bezwijk.

(…)

en ik denk: nee.
serieus. nee.
want ik ben mijn hele leven al aan het vallen. niet het soort vallen waar tiny het over heeft. hij heeft het over liefde. ik heb het over leven. bij mijn soort vallen is er geen zachte landing. alleen maar tegen de grond slaan. hard. dood, of wensend dat je dood was. dus al die tijd dat je aan het vallen bent is dat het afschuwelijkste gevoel dat er bestaat. omdat je het gevoel hebt dat je er geen controle over hebt. omdat je weet hoe het afloopt.

The day is November 11th, 2009. It is a Wednesday, and it’s evening. Earlier that night I had been thinking about this as he was discussing his glove collection. I always make this seem a more recurring topic than it actually was because it was such a topic of discussion with my girl friends. When I think about him now, I think about completely different things. I think about snow, giant Christmas trees to set on fire, fingertips through my hair, teeth against my lip. That one time he apologized for cursing and the expressions on his face on that night we talked on a bridge in the snow for several hours. That he tried so hard to make the beer bottle pop a certain way. Oh, and the stupid Individuvelism Duvel beer ad he thought was smart. He was beautiful, L was. He really was.

We were on a bridge, earlier that night, and he put his arm around me. I leaned against him slightly and I remember stressing about my coming out. I hadn’t come out to him yet, which in hindsight was one of the easiest things, ever, but I didn’t have that much experience coming out to boys, and the boys I had had classes with in my last two years of high school weren’t the most gay friendly people. They weren’t the most mature people either. I had no experience coming out to people I was interested in. In essence, I was nervous as soon as I thought about it, so I tried not to think about it that much. It was only our second date, so why was I even bothering myself with large topics like that? The answer of course is, we have no examples of how this is handled by fictional people on tv, and everyone does get most of their ideas from fictional people on tv.
There, on that bridge, I knew it was the kind of second date where things would happen.

We both signed up for the Pathé Unlimited card that makes me able to go to the movies ‘unlimitedly’, obviously. There was a couple beside us, she was a second year Meds major, he was a second year Communications major. She said she recognised me from somewhere and I was afraid she was the girl I had smiled at at the screening of Coming Out, the only gay movie to be made in the DDR, that premiered the night the Berlin Wall fell. (Which was November 9th.) She kind of resembled her, as far as I remembered from two days earlier in a darker room than the cinema. They asked us where we met and when we met and they thought we were cute for having met in our introductory week. He left out the part about his ex. I left out the part where I had felt like the enormous lesbian the entire introductory week.

We went to 2012, one of the biggest useless hypes in our dating history (the other hypes we went to were Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, Komt een vrouw bij de dokter and Up!, all four of which were much better than 2012). Afterwards, he walked me to my tram stop. He asked for my number with the kind of nervous anticipation I would come to recognise later. He said it was a cool number (it does have some sort of regularity), which belongs to the kind of strange pointless compliments I would come to recognise later.

My tram arrived and I didn’t want to get in. It was the feeling I used to have around him I once explained to him as feeling like I never had to be insecure about myself.

He kissed me. At the Rokin tram stop stupidly called “Spui”, although Spui is only remotely near there. If you would force me to point out the exact spot, I could. If you would force me to point out the exact time, I couldn’t. The exact feeling, I couldn’t. It was like, now I’m just gonna kiss you, like a snap decision, and then it was suddenly a moment that went on for some time. If he’s anything like me, which he is, only in a further stage in his life on some points, it wasn’t a snap decision at all, but that’s how it came across anyway.

I no longer miss him. I realised that months ago. All this, here, above, is all fond memories. I was in the cinema with my new girl friends from Scandinavian Studies because we were going to see Alice in Wonderland, back in March, and I saw the date on my Pathé Unlimited membership card. It says 11-11-2009. It will always say November 11th, 2009.

The song, the Foo Fighters song at the top of this post, when I hear it I think of him. I think of rainy afternoons and Modern Literature lectures and that one time I was standing a few rows in front of him talking to someone, and I looked up to see him scan me from top to toe. I think of when he played Under the Bridge by the Red Hot Chili Peppers for me and I wondered how he could ever know what songs to pick to perfectly sum up what I felt. The boy wasn’t that perfect, you know, L. He wasn’t. Still isn’t. But he was perfectly right for me at the time I met him.

Then there were N and me, in the last Linguistics lecture last year, discussing the difference between L and B the Danish major. Or actually N was, I was doodling. “B is someone who’s really arrogant but looks really nice. L is the opposite. He has such an incredibly arrogant face.”
“N, shut up. I’ll go sit somewhere else if we keep having this conversation.”
“I don’t mean that negatively. L is a great guy. He’s funny, I think. He just looks arrogant.”
“Just, cut it out.”
In front of us the two Russian majors who always attend Linguistics. They might have overheard us. I don’t care. I can stick up for my ex if it concerns his face. I mean, I like his face. I kissed that supposedly arrogant face and I would have kissed it way more often had I had the chances and the nerve back then.

Let the past be the past. Let the past be the brilliant past. I had such a great time with L, but it was good it ended. It was good it never got any further than it went. We both got out of it what we needed. I got out of it what I needed. And where I am right now, I would never do it over again. That’s the best part of it all. Because the thing about L and me is that neither of us was ever a hundred percent sure about what we were doing. It doesn’t matter the possible reasons for this, because there are plenty, the point is we were never completely sure about one another.

The other best part: I recently came to the conclusion L helped me to make me feel at home in Amsterdam. It was at the time my neighbour was one of the most intimidating and loud music playing person I’d ever met, before he moved out and the quiet polite Middle Eastern pilot guy who lives there now moved in. I was stressed from coursework and lectures and never being able to do my listening exercises because of aforementioned neighbour. I was only in the process of making my new friends. It was a good thing to have him there to help me get strong-rooted memories that are connected to Amsterdam.

It’s a shame I don’t see him often enough in a normal setting for us to ever get to the point where we can just ‘hang out’. Because I’d have liked that. He could have been a friend.

And now
I know you’ve always been
Out of your head, out of my head I sang

“Well, Brussels isn’t that bad. They have handsome men. If… you’re… into that.” The last sentence was dragged out slowly and I decided I needed a really big sip from my beer in order to avoid his scanning eyes. I thought, you are not gay and you’re scary too.

“Well, sometimes,” I shrug carelessly, and King Lear is dragged away from us by a good-looking gay boy to another group.

Later, I’m invited to the couch across from J the English major by S, who tells me he’s from LA, which is way too awesome, and then I finally realise why everybody insists on speaking English even between two Dutch people – it’s way too unclear who’s Dutch and who’s not. Earlier, I’d chatted to D from South Africa who went to Holland to study sexuology and Guy Who’s Name I Missed who works in some ministry. He told E the double English/Bussiness major you should focus on being happy instead of getting an MBA at some Spanish university (the best for an MBA, apparently – I learned a lot that night) and being rich. E draped his expensive grey vest better around his body and smirked one of his arrogant-looking smirks. He’s in fact one of the nicest guys I know, but he has this look. He uses it to imply what you just said is too ridiculous to reply to, but in a good-mannered way.

Macbeth is back and chats to J the English major, who tells him about her exes. She had a boyfriend when we were around  fifteen years old, and a little before I had my unclearness with L, she had unclearness with a girl who isn’t worth it. I wonder if I should butt in to save her from him. S from LA displays his Dutch skills. He’s only lived here for just over a year, and already he has nailed our pronunciation. His speech pattern is like google translate for the most part, but it sounds Dutch. He complains everyone switches to English even though he addresses them in Dutch, so it’s impossible to learn. “That’s so rude!” he says. I know what he means, it’s why I never learned Limburgish properly. People think it’s polite to switch.

“The other day I took a girl home. Just to see if I still knew how that worked,” I catch on my left, on the other side of J the English major. I look at Othello, astonished. Didn’t he have to explain he was gay? How drunk was she that she didn’t notice how feminine he was? I mean, even I would immediately cancel him out of my dating pool upon contact, and I’ve thought some silly things about attractive gay men in my life, on some occasions completely unaware they were gay. (Or bi.)

“So but, with girls, don’t you miss the dick?”

Imagine here an icy cold silence that fell in the room, had there been no music to overshadow this gross misstep from the mouth of Titus Andronicus. And then a sudden reappearance of sound as everybody realised what the guy had just said. And then an angry mob chasing him out of the gay pub night and ordering him never to return, ever, again.

That didn’t happen, because we were the only two people who heard him say that. E the English/Business major may have smirked arrogantly, but he was really busy avoiding him to begin with. I buttet in and defended J, and in the process, myself. When the conversation went on to big boobs and lips like Angelina Jolie, and a few more conversation stoppers like the dick comment, I hid my face in the fabric of J’s shirt, and although that didn’t make the guy disappear immediately, a little later he was gone anyway.

Then, on my right hand side, S from LA asks, with a face like he wants to cuddle us, “So are you guys a couple?”

Well, we’re not. And we get the question a lot, so it’s getting a bit annoying. But after Hamlet, that was exactly what I needed. So much more ‘hey, I like that you guys are here’.

—

You can never know for sure if this was biphobia or just lesbophobia, working from the assumption that everybody needs a penis in their bed, or two of them. But considering he had the facts, I’m lumping this under biphobia anyway. Like, but you’ve had a functional relationship with a guy, how can you not miss ‘the dick’? Instead of like, but you’ve never even tried ‘the dick’! It’s so characteristic he used exactly that word. And from a guy who’s activities seem to screem bi as well. (I know, I know, identity is not the same as activity. I am making the distinction in my head – he’s gay.) It’s sad. And one of these Shakespearian names is his actual name. I’m not ‘bigger than that’, or ‘above that’, or whatever. Let me be petty, just this once.

Can remember the last day I went to bed without one. I’d worn my friend M’s glasses for a night.

Have started withdrawing, avoiding the computer screen, squinting my eyes and rubbing my temples. I tend to have cold hands in autumn and winter. They’re a blessing against temples.

Have been thinking a lot about my late aunt H. She was the only one I could carry on a conversation with. The ones that are left are sweet, but they’re also fake. It takes a lot to get over an abusive father, and none of them fully succeeded. Not even my mom. Have been thinking about that a lot, too. It’s weird how at some point you can just think these things without getting depressed about it. Wonder if there’s still the need to ‘talk to a professional’ or whatever it is people keep telling me. My late aunt H died when I was fifteen, around Christmas, when I didn’t know myself yet, and before I had the chance to get to know about my mom and her siblings as children. I sometimes feel like she was taken away from me before my life started.

Before she died, she had these headaches. And then she started forgetting things and the whole world got fuzzy. She didn’t understand it. It was like seeing an adult slide back into the position of a child.

You can only go so long telling yourself you have no time to take a test. Truth is, I find it a bit scary. What if it isn’t my eyes? What if it’s something else? Migraines – I will have to go to a doctor for that. My mom even went to a neurologist. What if it’s a tumor or something?

Well, of course it’s not. But it’s like there are cramps in the back of my head that make it impossible to function. That something like that could have so much effect is scary in itself. I want to lay in bed all day doing nothing. Then after a day of doing nothing, I want to go out and forget about my headache, which doesn’t work, because all the while in a pub I will still have a headache.

Tomorrow I will dust myself off and get back on my feet. Tonight though, I had two painkillers and it still isn’t over. How is anyone supposed to sleep well like this?

Wisdom from my late grandmother: Niet klagen maar dragen en bidden om kracht.

Sometimes I’m a flailing sobbing child looking for the familiar hills in a flat, hollow land that will never be home to me. (It’s not the city, it’s not Amsterdam – that is home as it’ll always be. But here, across from the airport, everything is wind and fog and rain.) Only I don’t cry anymore. Haven’t cried in months. I’m stronger. Bought a purple H&M grandpa cardigan from the men’s department. My friends said they liked it. Soon, I’ll have glasses as well.

The times, they are a-changin’.

She’s wearing a skirt and red lipstick and she’s the most beautiful I’ve ever seen her. I can say that about people I’m just friends with, can’t I? Because it’s true, and I surprised myself with it. I’m not used to thinking of femme girls as extremely attractive. Sometimes they’re cute, but all has been said with that. We’re on the worn down leather couch and the worn down grandpa chair in S the Swedish major’s kitchen, for her birthday party, surrounded by friends S categorized into two groups: ‘youth’ and ‘house’. We’re in ‘university’, as announced to the group, and T went round shaking our hands and proclaiming he was in that category, to which all of us replied the same, and I said very seriously, “hi, I’m from her youth’. He thought I was smart for coming up with that, and I must say I was pretty pleased with myself as well. A scene evolved where he very seriously replied asking when I’d met her. Sometimes I lean closer to hear what she says, as she explains what her type is and what the connection always is to weekend dykes, a term she coined to describe people like S the Swedish major. It’s like talking about S when she’s a few feet away from us, and it implies I need to huddle closer as to not let S know what we’re up to.

Before we entered the kitchen itself, we as a group were in the hallway, a continuation of us eating pizza in Y the Swedish major’s kitchen. We’d all cooperated to create a present for S, even though she didn’t want one, and we figured we might as well come together a little earlier. I ordered a pizza with cheese and olives and ‘came out’ as a vegetarian in the process. It went down a lot easier as I suspect it will go down back home in the South. I’m not altogether used to this yet, especially when eating out, and there’s been one point where I had to eat around salami and ham in a salad I hadn’t inspected close enough before taking it.

My friends in Amsterdam are ‘relaxed’, is I suppose the word most Dutch people would use. We talk about a lot of things, we accept pretty much everyone, we can carry on a discussion without becoming all that frustrated, and we see the differences within our group. When you don’t speak with someone for a couple days, or when you don’t see each other for a couple weeks (or months, in some cases), that doesn’t matter. You can pick up where you left off. I’m sure we all worry what will happen once we move to different countries, but no one has approached the topic yet. I myself tend to tiptoe around it.

At some point some of us decided to socialize. I had a hilarious conversation with N the Swedish major about that, just after he’d returned form the bathroom, where apparently a couple girls were comparing bra sizes. I have no idea what other things went on I didn’t notice or didn’t see. Earlier that night, T the Swedish major called N a ‘homo’, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I don’t know T all that well, and I’m carefully avoiding to get to know him any better. N is one of the most amazing straight boys I know, and I would want hug him to pieces every time he says something T would probably consider gay. He wears flaming pink v-neck t-shirts and doesn’t blink twice about it, and is very straight in fact, thankyouverymuch.

M the former Swedish major, who now works in a bookstore, told me she was a bit scared of socializing and didn’t actually want to enter the kitchen itself. It was all a bit jokingly, but I know how she feels: I’m terrible with groups of people as well. She hid behind me, and I turned round and asked her if we were going to walk further inside. I did my semi-masculine duty and escorted her to the sink, my arm around her waist. For a long time now, I’m not sure where the line between femme and butch actually lies, but I know I’m sometimes balancing on it like a circus dancer on a tightrope. It’s my favourite vantage point to approach the world from, and it makes me feel more safe than either end of the spectrum. When she so obviously dresses femme on her five inch heels, and then bombards me as her safeguard into the worlds of ‘youth’ and ‘house’, I’m more than happy to step up to the job.

Later, after we’d left the worn down furniture and sat on the sink, M the Swedish major next to us spewing his stupid opinions on English and modern American imperialism, we have our little chats that don’t involve him or get through to him, and at one point she lays her hand on my right leg. It’s this familiarity of bi girls amongst themselves, that very clearly irritate M next to us. It’s one the welcome additions to my life I didn’t expect to happen when I decided to accept myself. Or when I decided to be out from the start in Amsterdam and not make a big deal out of it.

This is not one of those ‘I have a crush on someone’ posts. I don’t. I’m describing a phenomenon I see all around me when I see gay people. It’s like because there’s no male-female relation in our friendship, we have a little more room to breathe and not always stay a meter away from one another. Maybe this is the type of freedom I don’t typically allow myself around straight female friends that maybe straight female friends do allow themselves with one another.

Or I don’t know why this happens, but I’ve noticed it, and I like it.

—

Oh, one thing about ‘weekend dykes’: I know there’s a difference between physical and emotional attraction and some people can’t see themselves forming an emotional connection with another woman. That’s okay. I like S the Swedish major as a friend, and I respect the way she lives bisexuality. There’s no one way or another to do that, and although many people fail to see the difference between people like her and people like me, many people do, and I’m blessed with friends in the last category. ‘An’ ye harm none, do what ye will.’

—

“Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.” – George Saunders

They’ve given me my elective, my dreams, my support system;
everyone I ever wanted to gather on the day I give life,
all in one place,
or several places,
but all of them in my computer
whether I ever see them or not.

They’ve given me my talent. They’ve nurtured me
to the point where I wrote every day
just to keep the story running, or
just to keep my world from spinning.
They’ve shown me how to paint with nothing but thoughts.

The bad parts of social media should be erased.

The day my cousin asked me if I’d changed my e-mail address,
or when he used profanity I shy away from, so
unbelievably
disrespectful to women.
That I don’t know who to congratulate online
because they’ve never treated me like a person
in any family gathering.

It’s a good thing when you can keep in touch with your relatives.
It’s a horrible thing when you can keep in touch with -

Okay no. I like them.
I like them for being my past and giving my future direction.
Away from here.
Blow me the wind away from here to the snow where their voices
will never be heard, or if they’ll be heard,
not understood. Because I speak in tongues they will never master,
I speak in cultures they will never see.

Are you confused as I am?
Are you unaware of the spatial turn and the material dimensions
and the flowing reality and the attachments and the invasion of private space
and the negotiability and the constructed realities?
What I learn is:
You can construct your own world now. Just erase what doesn’t fit.
Well, I’m trying. And between the cracks, I still get bothered with the past I ran from.
Let me mend it. Let me close the cracks so no darkness comes through,
so only my culture, my space, my language exists.

Whatever I write on exams: It doesn’t work that way.