where do I even start #2
There’s a restlessness. Sometimes I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and think, what did change?
It’s 2026 and I need to remind myself of something I wrote here in July 2025, four months after we broke up, two months after I left our together home. This is what I wrote:
I think about the colours I might paint the walls of my future apartment and how that apartment will probably be small and expensive and old, and I won’t have that many close friends in town yet, and I will have to drag up an entire life structure again, but I will do it, and it will be mine
It’s the last bit of text in the piece I’m most proud of writing (truths about post-breakup life). I think it has some of my most raw, most honest, most vulnerable writing yet. That’s not the point. The point is that I found it. I found my future apartment??? I found my future apartment, I signed the rental agreement, and I received the keys. That means that I’m moving into a tiny, barnlike doll house in February. It is small, it is expensive, and it is old. In fact, it once used to be a coach house. What a way to start the Year of the Horse, aye?
In the snowy landscape of this morning I layered up and shuffled outside to unlock my bike, only to find out that the lock was frozen. I’d also just missed the bus. So I called my dad to see whether he could pick me up in the car. I’m 10 minutes from my parents now, and we’ve been chauffeuring each other around quite a bit. It will be one of the new perks of my life as a village gal, walking around with a basket on one arm and a book in the other. A car within easy reach.
This is not what I ever thought my life would look like. Living in the same (beautiful, leafy green, extremely comfy) town as my parents? Who is she? Even a year ago, I had just moved into a bought flat in the most city-like city in the Netherlands. A flat that looked out over the river, where I could see barges and cruise ships float by. I jumped on my bike and did a million things per day, seeing friends for coffees, making decisions about renovations, taking the train to go to my office job. Ever so steadily, the feeling crept up on me that this was not me, this was not the life that was meant for me.
And look at me now. Tomorrow I’ll see a friend for coffee and I will want to make decisions about renovations. I transport myself between these towns and again feel the urge to do a million things per day. So what’s the difference? Sometimes I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and think, what did change? What did I change all this scenery for, yet to do the same things in another town?
It’s that thought that loops around, motivated by fear. Feeling the uncertainty of change makes me want to grab a problem by the horns and fix it. Urgency pumps through my veins. There’s a restlessness. But I know things now. I’ve learned that restlessness means slowing down, not speeding up. I will never be able to control life. There’s no game to win here.
There’s no game to win here.
