On Longing

You want to do nothing, but you are in a constant state of longing. This is normal. Everyone feels like this, you say.

You admire people who are always busy and find things to do. They are decisive and full of energy. They don’t stand over seven small piles of laundry creating an obstacle course on the floor, deciding if they should take a shower, but maybe later because they should exercise, but they should shave their legs because their legs are too stubbly for capri leggings but that’s too much work.

You should take a shower.

But you need to study Dutch, your last inburgering exam for permanent residency is in two weeks — Dutch culture, you have already passed all the Dutch language exams. You will pass the final exam and then the only thing left will be the matter of figuring out how to make exactly 4,500 euros by writing to prove to the Dutch government that you won’t be a financial burden, and apparently 4,500 euros is the amount the Dutch government requires, so maybe it’s time to fire up the ole paywall on Stroopwaffled, but what if no one reads your stuff, you’ve been wanting people to read your stuff your whole life and you certainly don’t want to put up any roadblocks now.

Four hours later, you are still in your lounge pants and books-are-magic t-shirt that you’ve been sleeping in all week, sitting in the white arm chair that goes perfectly with the green velvet sofa in your parlor leading to the garden of your crumbling gothic house in Oud Zuid, Amsterdam, and it’s really just so lovely here. So nice. But the landlord is selling your gothic crumbling house, and you have to find a new house that will fit your green velvet sofa, but everything is a billion euros and the Dutch stairs are trying to murder you and you are completely overwhelmed at the prospect of moving.

Time to smoke a little weed. But smoking is terrible for your body. A quarter of the weed brownie from the Borenjoegens Coffeeshop is a sublime experience — so happy and floaty and bursting with creative excitement, even if one time you were sure you were writing the most brilliant work of your life — scribbling notes on a million different Post-Its as the words flooded your brain too fast for you to write, but Dutch Post-Its are bullshit — the glue is nonsense, they don’t stick to anything, and the next morning you rush downstairs to read all the brilliant Post-Its, only to discover all the Post-Its had fallen off all the walls where you’d stuck them, and they littered the parlor, dining room, hallway, and kitchen. Little miniature pastel scrolls everywhere. You unroll one with great anticipation — the brilliance, you can’t wait for it to wash over you — you unroll it and try to decipher the barely legible scribble and it says something akin to “And she was a witch all along!!!!!!!!”

Alas. Not your best work.

You are filled with longing but also want to do nothing, and you also have to factor in time for all of the crying. You had an appointment with your gyno to discuss how the HRT he prescribed wasn’t working — you were bleeding constantly and you still can’t stop crying. You cry when you tell him this. He orders blood tests and says he wants to do an exam to rule out anything nefarious and you crawl bare assed up into the chair and put your feet into the stirrups, your legs splayed spread eagle with absolutely zero paper or cloth gown, modesty is not a thing in the Netherlands, and he tells you everything seems to be in working order but then the clinic somehow loses your blood (vampires, you posit) but his Dutch secretary somehow manages to track it down. Leave it to a middle-aged Dutch lady — they get shit done. Now you will try estrogen gel and hope you stop bleeding and crying.

Perhaps a smidge of weed would be nice. You stopped drinking alcohol almost 8 years ago. You don’t call yourself sober, or follow a program, and you (re)discovered you like weed a couple of years ago when you finally screwed up the nerve to buy a joint from a Coffeeshop that sells weed in Amsterdam and you took your joint to the Vondelpark and smoked a puff and laid down in grass and watched the clouds and you remembered you like weed. A lot. You wonder if you need to be worried about it. You don’t miss alcohol at all. Stopping drinking was anticlimactic. Nothing specific led to that decision.

There were little things, like the time you did shots at Joe’s Crab Shack with your Falls Church, Virginia neighbors that you weren’t really friends with but they were your neighbors and you were all drinking shots at Joe’s Crab Shack even though you were all middle aged suburbanites who could not handle shots, and you realized you were going to be sick and you didn’t want to puke in the bathroom at Joe’s Crab Shack so you told your husband it was time to scram and you ran home, your husband and your neighbor chasing you, but you cut across the plush lawns and lost them. Then you crouched down and peed in Kenneth Starr’s daughter’s front yard for reasons only tangentially related to Kenneth Starr. You got into bed with a washcloth and a trash can, the walls streaked bubble gum pink with the Pepto Bismol you splashed all over them after puking in your own toilet, and you advised your husband you’d require an ambulance. “Okay, but is that really what you want? An ambulance pulling into the driveway at 12:30am?” he asks you. No. It was not.

You don’t miss alcohol.

You want to do nothing but you are also filled with longing. “What do you do all day?” people ask. “Nothing,” you say. But it’s not true.

You are taking a writing class where you have to stay up from 1-4 am once a month, and you are working on an essay collection. You alternate between thinking it’s a heartbreaking work of staggering genius and a steaming pile of garbage.

You are studying to pass the Dutch inburgering exams for permanent residency.

You are looking for a new house.

You are still parenting an autistic/nonbinary kid who is back in the States attending college, and you experience new levels of worry for your kid as RFK Jr. espouses eugenics and Trump unleashes ICE.

Also, the crying.

But the weather is gorgeous. Amsterdam summer is here, the vengeance bear you made out of papier-mâché and chicken wire for your 50th birthday summer solstice castle party (but you didn’t have the heart to set him on fire) lives in your garden and he’s wearing his flower crown in anticipation of the longest day of the year, when the light will remain in the sky til midnight. The canals sparkle like jewels and Shrimpy, your little canal boat, is running like a dream. It’s so beautiful here it could break your heart.

You feel longing, and do nothing.

The vengeance bear we made for my 50th birthday summer solstice castle party sitting in the garden next to Robert Plant, the water feature I asked James to make after I showed him a photo of Robert Plant as inspiration and said I wanted it to “have lights and mist, sometimes”.