I am uncomfortable with the concept of Amsterdam as a memory.
It has been two weeks since I left—a tumultuous blur of travel, holidays, celebration, family, and re-acquaintance with the United States.
Last week I got lunch with an Amsterdam friend, and we shared the same startling fact: Amsterdam feels like it was a dream. Because once you’re suddenly back in the room you grew up in that’s covered in swim signs and childhood pictures and old magazine cut-outs of Tom Brady, a part of you clicks back into place. Whether you’d like it to or not.
It’s a scary automatic thing. What does it say about me, about us, if we accept the challenges and change of such a transformative experience only to separate from it so suddenly and cleanly once we reenter our comfort zone?
I had a moment in one of the last weeks I had there. It was a Thursday night—snow had blanketed the ground that day and we’d hiked over to the brewery to grab a few drinks before the night’s later festivities. After a beer, I dipped out early to get a few more paragraphs done on my paper before I could enjoy the night without guilt. I walked back along the canal, and there was no one else in sight. I stopped for a minute, hands in pockets, and took a breath. This is a moment, I thought. It’s quiet. I live here. This is a moment. What does it mean? And I racked by brain, destroying the pricelessness of it all in my unceasing desire to document and categorize my obsessive sentimentality, only to realize it meant nothing at all.
But that, in itself, was the beauty of it. We take our experiences abroad in their most extremes. We spend much of our time processing wondrous sights, heightened anxieties, and unfamiliar everything. In that moment, I was suspended between it all, enveloped in a city that had become home, marveling at a city that could somehow become quiet, assuaging creeping fears of a stressful finals season, warming at the discovery of great friends.
Amsterdam was my fairytale—a happily ever after that included customs and security check at the Philadelphia International Airport. In my fairytale, the heroine escapes from the most comfortable of towers and learns to navigate the forest without any help from a white knight or friendly woodland creatures. My heroine rides a purple rusty bike instead of a stallion, wears leggings instead of a gown, and doesn’t get any guy at the end. But man, does she have a good story to tell.
I will continue to encounter people who will ask, “Well, how was it?” and I will continue to be absolutely unable to respond. I feel just as unsure about how to finish this post. Some of it’s fear, because a conclusion means it’s really over. Here’s a go at it: It was great, it was awesome, it was scary, it was beautiful, it was cold, it was rainy, it was sunny, it was friendly, it was busy, it was touristy, it was homey, it was nothing I expected but everything I wanted.
That’s how it was. Any more questions?
