A little digital love triangle picked up steam in the night of Thursday on Friday. Three young men, but small bits of time away from earning their degrees and once part of the same fellowship, shared their thoughts about surviving the whims of places that had been home before.
My law school friend started the conversation with a nostalgic reminder of teeth-staining buckets of red wine consumed on a road trip to nowhere leading us along a farmer with a rugby-ball-sized beet, a wildly burning gas canister thrown in the wrong direction, a starry night viewed face-up on the tar of a windy forest road and all the randy banter about girls in general and in particular. The last sentence he typed down was about his poor roof covered in 9 feet of pure white snow, and the absence of sunlight, which had been behind cloud covering for over a week.
I had just worked a shift at the nightclub, came home, finished another chapter for my thesis and saw a snowstorm brew and cover Amsterdam in a layer of lofty white flakes. When i was done typing for credit I answered the fellowship with an e-mail about the woes of the weather, and decided not to go to sleep yet. While the sky was filling itself with a pink light so pretty it would be kitsch if you'd copy it in a painting, I donned my hiking boots and decided to go for a stroll in the city I hadn't seen so eerily white.
I wondered where they had come from, the tough men, perseverence etched in their brows covered with a tiny film of sweat, fuming fag in the corner of their mouth, scraping and clattering with shovels and brooms in front of shops and houses. The snow had stopped falling and the sun broke through the clouds, right at the horizon for a few minutes. A junky asked me if I was the police, I told him I wasn't but asked why he thought I was. "Because you're smiling like that!" Another snowstorm swept in from the direction of the nascent rays, piercing my eyes with tiny artificial tears, trying to catch the last glimpse of the radiance in a sleep-deprived haze.
When I got up later that afternoon the snowing had continued, leading to a thick carpet of surplus bringing out the best and worst in people. Before I manically went on a moonscape-themed walk through the animated Vondelpark, I read the response from the third musketeer. He told my law school friend that it can be therapeutic to write on your living room wall that "everything is gonna be ok!", and explained he hadn't been so busy with life in a long time, fucking three girls at the same time and doing several jobs. He complimented me on a literary toast that will be the end of today's essay, summing up the spirit of the bond I feel I share with these two characters situated thousands of miles apart.
"Here's to the brave heroes who travel the seas to park their vulnerable selves in constantly changing constellations far away from home... there's something about sharing this that makes us invincible."
