the axis of sadness and romance

annual september attempt to try and grasp time

1. the axis of sadness and romance

this time last year, when i was twenty-three going on twenty-four, and got in my annual contemplative september mood, i felt that i could visualize my past year spread out over the axis of sadness and romance. 

sept 14 2022

i tried to summarize a year which i could hardly remember because it was covered under a comforting blanket of alcohol and cigarettes. i tried to reflect on a summer that was spent in a high state of ecstasy which by september had vaporized and left me empty handed.  

sept 19 2022

once again alone. in the first phrase i found a new mantra 

tranquility is like the tides to me, like all and everything. i don’t think balance means that i find myself in the middle of the axis of sadness and romance ever, but rather that in waves of varying length i find myself sweeping from one side to the other

2. many beds

i tried to remember the year by writing about the many beds i had slept for its duration. i moved house twice which makes a total of three beds but also i did not sleep at home all the time. i wrote about them in a word doc called sadnessandromance_prose from which i cannot copy paste anymore since my office license expired. i retyped some bits here.

i turned twenty three in the bed of a thirty-nine year old.

“on the morning of my birthday he took me out for early cake at Toki, after which i returned to the flat i had shared with my at that point very freshly turned ex-boyfriend, who then took me out for coffee too. i was past the point of crying at the sight of his clothes in our closet. it felt criminal to have the old man’s smell linger on my skin whilst drinking coffee squeezed together to young man in the unheated little caravan cafe in the desolate area directly next to our building.”

during winter i spent many nights in an unheated room, warmed by the body of a boy with a funny name. i’d gotten to know him and his roommate intimately one night, before the thirty-nine year old dumped me. i remember fried eggs on early mornings when he’d have to got to work as a carpenter. 

“these sleepovers passed high on the romance scale when we would be glued together cozily all night in his bed (I could never fall asleep there for a mosquito plague, his snoring, and the junkie neighbor whose room was in the same cold attic) and high on the sadness scale when during breakfast the morning news was on and no one would speak much and i’d feel like an uninvited guest. I see him sometimes now and we are kind to each other.”

after all these unheated spaces came may when i met a boy who kissed my forehead on the dancefloor and then did not leave my side for the next two months or so. i spent many nights drinking absurd amounts of wine and sleeping in a palo santo cleansed bed. it was a lot of romance until it wasn’t. in my first diary entry on the boy mere weeks after meeting him i can already read the end of it 

“ik ben verliefd op o en hij op mij maar o heeft een ex en dat is rommelig gegaan”

“i don’t know what happened first, us having sex in the toilet booth or me writing Rob <3 Ol at the wall of the balcony of Garage. he later told me he was always worried his ex would spot the writing, which was indiscreetly big.”

i spent some nights in my parents bed when they were away. picking the fruits of their garden in the morning. all i found was the promise of abundance.

aug 16 2022

in september i started sleeping in my own bed in my second new house that year, a deep dreamless sleep due to the joints i had returned to smoke alone on the balcony every night. a year after my relationship ended i still didn’t think myself capable of falling asleep by myself.

3. a day in barcelona

tranquility is like the tides to me and experience is so cyclical. september is ending and i try to remember my past round around the sun. much change, some constants. i still feel like im just living life passively floating on a wave that calmly swings me from sadness to romance. 

romance in leaving my hungover friends in our hotel room in sitges. knowing my way to the station and knowing which platform to go to. seeing past versions of myself in september 2017 on this same station. my body was then the biggest it ever was. then it shrunk. now its limits have expanded again. i try sitting in the phantom of my past self on the same bench. i don’t fill her up yet but im closer to her edges than i have been in the past five years.

sadness in the drained emptiness of being alone after five days of constant companionship and sharing beds. 

romance in it too. 

romance in calling clara whilst sitting on this train. her telling me our friend is dating my ex. experience is so cyclical, i think, whilst watching the waves of the mediterranean until we enter a tunnel and the connection gets cut.

romance in arriving to sants. sadness in not remembering to not take the endless tunnel from the train to the metro but instead walk outside over the square where the air is fresh.

romance in arriving to poble sec. phantoms of myself here in 2015 with my four blond friends. phantoms of myself here in 2016 with two suitcases and my father. phantoms of myself here 2 days prior before going to eat lentils and botifarra and bonito for lunch.

romance in taking the elevator up to diana’s apartment where we whisper to not wake her roommates, me kissing her lover goodbye, her lover who i met as her friend in 2019 and we watched my first pedro almodovar together on a sofa on plaza tetuan. 

romance in her asking me ‘will you keep me company whilst i buy plants’ and walking hand in hand.

sept 17 2023

romance in finding i have grown to be much more comfortable with physical affection between me and my best friends, appreciating she never stopped stroking my arms even when i couldn’t give it back to her in equal measure. 

sadness in making the grand confession to her and myself that i was never as happy in barcelona as i have been in amsterdam. understanding that the fear of being alone may find root in loneliness experienced when being displaced.

sadness in acknowledging our life together here will not exist again.

romance in pretending it does for one day, as we go for lunch and share salmorejo, gildas and couscous, and i sleep on her sofa whilst the apartment heats up, and we go see a movie about surpressed female sexual desire in hostafrancs, where we eat crisps and drink vermut on the street before the movie starts, and she asks me if i know the meaning of a word, and i confess i do not, and she explains to me. zumzeig.

sadness in waking up at 4.45 and leaving the house, forgetting my earrings and charger on her nightstand, not knowing when i will see her again.

4.

i am turning twenty five and tranquility is like the tides to me. i will forever re read my diaries and try to fit my current shape in phantom versions of my past self that accompany me on this cyclical journey some may call growing older. my body’s limits shifting over time. much change, some constants. i’m going to fry an egg now.