thoughts carved into wax
I have been biding my time under weeping willows, eating croissants, drinking liters strawberry-orange "cool best" juice and counting my new favorite birds. There are sable ducks with bright white foreheads that look pre-historic on land with gangley huge feet. Made friends with a few over granola. Found a sharpened pencil in the mud and sketched the scene. Friday was a mental health day, Carl Bain style, who taught me once the value of being really good to yourself from time to time. The Stedelijk (modern) and the Van Gogh then ate out for the first time alone, quasi-pretending to be travelling alone, though not so far from the truth. Solo diners filed in behind me, and we all sat with various reading and writing projects, eating our nan at separate tables and making awkward eye contact. Went to Utrecht on Saturday, the next city south, a mini-Amsterdam, of sorts. We came out of the train station into a capitalist explosion of supermalls and endless market stalls before finding quiet stone streets and murky canals. It was a pleasant day of wandering past closed museums and feeling full of mild temperatures. Stroop waffle icecream, an overload. A time warp, really. I felt like we had slid back a few decades. Sunday was a queer-o-rama, dancing dirty under black light, not caring about an audience. It is nice to lock eyes and forget where you are, letting rhythm take over, forgetting - about unreturned letters. about vulnerability. about all versions of home(s). about plans. about the imaging of bodies. about counting. about time. we were present for a moment, embracing only the here and the now and nothing else. now, I will make my bed with clean sheets and try and scrounge up a presentation for class tomorrow.
