wanderlust

I'm sitting in a small cafe pen sketching these thoughts -- some downtime tonight finally from faces, names, games and places that've been occupying my head and my time.

Rushing, swirling -- each day cascading into the next -- makes difficult to choose events to relate; none is so meaningful by itself, but a summary isn't possible either. Just a few, then...

Flew to Brussels, Belgium on Saturday with friends, Makram & Javi. Jolly were we three, and our language a mixture of French, Spanish and English, but mostly consisting of "Que fuerte", "¡No sea!", "To-tal", "I mean..." and "Prrrrrfect!" We checked in at Makram's friend's house for the first night, and she took us out to a pub, then a stroll around the city center the next morning. Beautiful, though I'm not sure we got a real feel for the city, but the three of us took off again the next moment in our red rented Fiat Punto -- "the B" -- on the road to Amsterdam.

Of course Amsterdam is more in-your-face easier to dig, and we dug, spending most of our time in the coffee shops and just walking about, and some time in the Van Gogh museum. Super sketched we were on our nighttime jaunt through the super seedy red light district, where women beckoned from behind glass doors. They wear little, and look like they should look (raunchy TV whore?) or like they shouldn't (girl-next-door?) but it is all strange and wrong and sad, and there are people asking us if we need ecstasy, dangerous looking guys talking quietly and shifting eyes, a short black woman walking next to us, petitioning us or yelling at us or -- please leave us alone, you're distracting me from the small alleyway scenery and this strange man in front of me that just - yes - just did a line of coke from a little tobacco tin.

And then there's Esther. My only reservation in leaving for Brussels (and leaving her behind.) She is Swiss-German and magic. She told me not to cut my hair because I look like jim morrison, and we walked along the edge of where the ocean meets the land meets the stars, and then were curled up, each on a shelf in a small pitch-black closet, and shared fears and hopes and secrets for awhile, and she told me about color-meditation, and then she would whisper something like "think of green -- like the grass" and I tried but her gentle voice plucked each blade of grass out of my mind and blew them all over the place and I marvelled this breeze instead. But she is magic, magic and beautiful, and (though I begin to think I have a sign on my forehead: "non-single girls apply here,") she gave me her travel stone and hopes it leads me to Switzerland and I assure you I am not obsessed; only amazed.