Practically naked

I’m not sure how to begin writing about the interim, from finishing my cycling journey to returning home, finding work and getting a place, falling in love. It was the end of November, that’s how I’ll begin.

It was the end of November, and there was no money.

There was no money, I had left everything in France. No clothing aside from the outdoor and cycling gear - not even underwear, I considered that to be dead weight. I was living with my mother, jobless, educated strangely for this market. I had lost considerable weight which I’ve since found again. Rain was coming down over Eindhoven and I felt alone, but for my mother’s dog sleeping in bed with me.

I’d told everyone - everyone! - that this was to be my great voyage to the mysterious east. Rolling past Kazakhstan plains signalling hunger to wondering natives marvelling at the crazed white boy and his bike. Instead I was watching Masterchef Australia with my mother and Jon, raiding their fridge whenever they weren’t looking. Feeling a failure and a victor simultaneously, which is fine. Important even. For a long time, I had felt nothing but fear.

If you think it felt cleansing or healing to go and come back, it didn’t at first. Although the idea of arriving home naked and penniless has a baptismal aura to it, the primary emotion was sadness. I was so sad, because there was finally space to be sad. This had started in France already, where I’d spent nights in hotel rooms and tents unable to sleep, drunk on pastis, alone, working on myself in my own way.

To be completely honest with you, there were nights when I eyed the hunting knife my friends had gotten me before the trip with cloudy romance, toying with dark ideas, pressing the tip of that blade into my notebook to write what I consider some of the worst and necessary poetry I’ve ever written: depressive shite, all caps.

When I was home, my mother was exceptionally kind. Jon was exceptionally kind. We decided, without really discussing it, that we’d have a few quiet months in the winter together, watch some television, rotate who cooks, who does the dishes. Making life small enough to enjoy with ease.

I used the remains of my credit card to buy underwear and a pair of pants. Things were looking up. The winter seemed gentle, and the roads of the Rhône Alps were fresh in my mind. I’d gone cycling in the area and slowly, surely, I was feeling some agency return. A job was to be found.

Jon had given me a nice pair of shoes and a shirt to wear to an interview for a job as a translator and copywriter. I’d never been either, but the writing appealed to me. Working in Leiden appealed too. We got on well during the meetings, the owners of the agency were an intelligent couple who, in their own way, have carved out a beautiful existence. They gave me a chance, and in the beginning of December, two weeks back in the country, I was driving the two hours back and forth to Leiden from Eindhoven, mostly listening to Tony Rice, spending the day working. Writing.

I was walking through Amsterdam on a free Wednesday, making notes for a story about my grandfather I’d wanted to write, when I was invited to come see a house in the west of the city. Sophie and Bram lived there and were looking for a flatmate. They too gave me a chance. And they gave me a home.

It was still December. And just as quickly as I’d let go of everything, another life had taken shape. At the close of the month, Christmas, I was with my father and Monique on Ameland, back where the journey had started. The importance of leaving, I thought then, as I looked at the big fella carving the lamb, both of us well into the red wine, hazy with joy, the importance of leaving was to be able to look at him without the fear. I’d brought the fear to France too, and left it there.

He would say to me growing up: I love you more than life itself. I say that our relationship is repeated in everything I do and see: how I am with my friends, what I think as I stare at the summer trees out my window, when I now and then think of the clouds over the Alps and the changing colour of the forests there, the way my dad and I laugh so similarly, eyes squinting cheeks puffed. Without beginning or end, Ingrid Jonker wrote, I repeat you.

Fanfei and I met shortly after Christmas, still December.

You just need to know one thing about her to understand just how miraculous she is: she makes the world around her a lighter place. I love her completely, stupidly, she reduces me to who I truly am.

That love began in January, I invited her on a trip. My mother had rented a house in Belgium for a weekend and we agreed to spend a few nights there. It was by the sea, we’d brought kites. My sister and Fanfei and myself went out onto the windless shore, hung over, grey long streets and concrete expanding around us.

‘My grandfather used to fly kites,’ Fanfei said, not there, but hours earlier, I think in bed. She’d said it the way you talk about war heroes in the family. Reverence, is the word. Without knowing her grandfather, I understood that she aspired to walk through life with his soul in her arms.

Fanfei grabbed the kite, which was red, purple, green and brown. She unwound the string and ran down a long paved street, trees hugged apartment buildings on either side.

We’d had no succes with the wind. But as Fanfei ran, the kite replied. Shaking, delighting in the gusts.

It was to my mind as if someone was guiding the wind. As if to let us know they were there, holding onto the cheap fabric of that many-coloured kite.

Fanfei became tiny in the distance. The kite danced in the far sky.

I knew I loved her when I saw her running, when I realised her beauty was in the pursuit of that wind.