Skyline in blue
I’ve haven’t noticed the sky for a while.
I’ve been caught in my thoughts, like fishes in a net—tangled and wriggling and gasping for water. Yes, fishes and I know how it feels to drown.
I’ve spent the greater part of the past month inside airports and airplanes, absurdly carrying close to half my bodyweight in baggage from America to Europe to England and back again.
They were necessary journeys all, and as always they were journeys of discovery—though not intentionally, this time. There were meetings, warm greetings, and a long and final goodbye to somebody beloved.
In Amsterdam I went AWOL for a spontaneous cocktail hour at the Pulitzer hotel on the Prinsengracht with a delightful, inspiring, new-old friend who I could happily sit with forever. The clock was ticking for a business dinner and we had to part ways. I’ll hopefully see him next year and until then, well, there’s Facebook and Instagram. A street away on the Keizersgracht Vripack’s Night Out (part of the annual Metstrade tradeshow) proved once again to be a robust shot in the arm of intellectual and creative inspiration in the form of marine technological innovation.
The next few mornings I walked the city, snapping photographs and browsing in bookstores, and in the afternoons I wrote in a cafe with a cappuccino or a bowl of soup close to hand. Wandering back to our quirky, steeply vertical three-storey Airbnb townhouse at dusk, in the mizzle, dodging bicycles, I felt as if I belonged to this country. Then I realized that I do.
Later in the week we drove from Heathrow airport through Gloucestershire’s rolling countryside, where early shrouds of fog were dissolving into green fields. But in England I was cold and damp to my bones—though I think that was as much due to the nature of the visit as to the climate. I was thirsty too, and that’s unusual for me. There’s no need to be thirsty in England, where you can walk in the rain or drink tea or pop into a pub to hydrate. In Amsterdam there’s Amsterdam water, the sweetest I’ve tasted, straight from the tap. Maybe it had spoiled me. In England, my motherland, I craved something that was unavailable. I craved sweetness and warmth and sunshine and liquid and the living. I sat in a deep church and sang hymns as I was instructed, and I came out thirsting and cold and bleak.
So I hold on to the picture that I took on one of those mornings exploring Amsterdam, close to my father’s story. Of reflections on water, and blue sky and the warmth of the sun, and the folk who I imagine are pedalling their bicycles back to those houses across the canal, to cook dinner in their marvelous curtainless homes for all the world to watch. Transparent. Intentional. Gezellig. Keeping their heads proudly above water. Living against the sky, day upon day.
