There’s something about Amsterdam. There’s always something about Amsterdam.
Every time I arrive, it feels like a homecoming. My shoulders relax, my jaw unclenches, and my restless soul settles, if only minutely. I’m not sure if there’s a true cure for a restless soul, though. Oh, I can treat the symptoms well enough: long drives to nowhere, road trips, a flight when I can afford it. Occasionally, a book or show can be used as a hold-over pill. A cure, though? If there is one, I have yet to find it.
Head in the clouds, unruly soul, heart a tattered library book I keep loaning out.
An intense feeling of unbelonging trails behind me, a tired little duckling whispering questions I can’t answer. Will you ever find it? Contentment? Will you ever feel satisfied enough to stay in one place? Are you capable of rest? I don’t know, tiresome creature. You tell me.
I reach for tethers, hoping they’ll pin me to one place long enough to figure something, anything out. Moor myself to people, places, things. It never works the way I want it to. I lunge and lash against them with greater and greater intensity until they’re released or snap with painful recoil.
The cure remains a mystery, may always remain a mystery. I choose to remain hopeful that I’ll somehow find one. Perhaps stumble across it in an old recipe book, find it in the kiss of a whirlwind romance, or in the dregs of the tea leaves in my millionth cup of tea.
But until then, at least there’s something about Amsterdam.