Alone in Amsterdam

The work of wings / was always freedom

I’ve never had an issue travelling alone. Once I left high school, I found excuses to leave home for weekends or weeks at a time, visiting friends in New York or Maryland or Los Angeles or Portland. Experiencing my rendered body, isolated from my all-too-familiar environment, made me feel like I was moving towards something. I wanted to see where I fit in the wider world. I mostly met up with friends, but there were times I made excuses to slip away on my own. This was when I would bask in the realisations that make being alone so fruitful. Usually, these consisted of a brash desire to escape, a reinforcement of the independence I felt so denied of. I felt that, when given the wings, I could finally be myself, and escape to the life I was destined to live. Returning home felt like intense heartbreak. It amplified the emotional intensity of my solitude.

Such feelings mainly took place in transit, like in an airport, which makes me think of this poem by Ada Lìmon, “The Problem With Travel”:

Every time I'm in an airport, 
I think I should drastically 
change my life: Kill the kid stuff, 
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below 
the radar like an escaped canine 
sneaking along the fence line. 
I'd be cable-knitted to the hilt, 
beyond beautiful buying, believe in 
the maker and fix my problems 
with prayer and property. 
Then, I think of you, home, 
with the dog, the field full 
of purple pop-ups -- we're small and 
flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where 
I'm going, all over again. 

It wasn’t until I moved away from home that I started to travel for reasons beyond escapism. I was no longer in search of myself. Instead, I felt stuck in an identity echo chamber, overwhelmed with possibilities. It settled down, as all things do. The novelty wore off, and I found my life reflected in familiar corners of a once unfamiliar city, in new friends and a decorated apartment. As the stagnancy caught up with me, I began to lose touch with myself. I missed my interior monologue and the wide-eyed observation of a new place. There’s something beautiful about walking down a new street with a friend, pointing out little things and then turning to each other. But it’s that last bit — that turning — that I let overpower everything else. I don’t go out without having another body to greet me at the end, and I ask friends to come with me to grocery shop or see a film. The comfort of having another body nearby has distracted me from my own, and I’m afraid I’ve let it grow weak with neglect.

“Candid in May” by Mary Ruefle:

My heart: that awful, familiar thump 
like hitting something on the road. 
Betty says we benefit from experience 
by losing illusions, 
but I seem to gain them. 
Now I'm awash. 
I say the same thing over and over. 
In some religions, that's good. 
In mine, it's disastrous. 
Conduct me, please. 
there was a time when for me 
a tree was a tree. 
It was not the second branch of my sadness
growing out of a remedial measure proposed 
for the first. 
I forget the nature of things. 
I forget the irradiated moon 
has enough of her own intent
to cause an ankle in Athens
to swell. It's been a long time 
since I left things alone. 
Time to pluck out my eyes. 
Look at me, 
already sprouting my third branch! 

On the 6:15 train to Amsterdam, half-awake and sluggish, I sat as the fourth wheel to a mother, a father, and their young son. They played a card game together, the freckled boy across from me carefully trying to avoid my space. Their enthusiasm only emphasised my singleness, and I remained quiet, facing the window until they got off at Brussels. When I arrived, I let my body carry me through the city and into my hostel, and upon dropping my luggage off I ran into a curly-haired boy by the bathroom. “Do you have a key?” he said. “It’s locked.” I shook my head, and he hummed in response. It was an awkward five minutes before someone came down to let us through — I stood against the wall and fiddled with my sweater while he paced up and down the stairwell. The bathroom was dark and quiet, lights flickering when it sensed my body in motion. I pitied myself in the mirror as I washed my hands. Why didn’t I ask his name? My friends used to think I was intimidating before I opened my mouth. I felt the same brand of shame as I did when I auditioned for Ariel in middle school and got Ursula instead. Am I not warm? Am I not kind? How can I move through life in this way, closed off to the sweetness of the world?

by Charlotte Ager

I’ve spent the past few years carving out my life out of exotic marble. Friends were found in the strangest of places, and I travel an hour across town to my favorite bookshop because they know my name. It’s been a long time since I’ve introduced myself to anybody in person. At a sandwich shop near the Museum District, I sat at a metal table on the sidewalk, hoping the wind would shock me out of my head. A woman came up to me and asked if I was alone. I nodded, expecting her to take the extra chair away, but she sat beside me instead. We ate in silence, and when I finished, I thanked her for joining me. As I was walking away, I suddenly turned back to ask her name. She gave it to me and asked for mine in return. My own name felt foreign, my mouth re-adjusting to its weight of it. Saying it out loud in a new place felt like solidifying my presence there, as if the wind would carry it all over the city, like the fluttering seeds of a dandelion.

“One Heart” by Li-Young Lee:

Look at the birds. Even flying
is born 

out of nothing. The first sky 
is inside you, open 

at either end of day. 
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening 
one heart to every falling thing.

Sometimes I feel like I experience the world inside-out, like a graphic T-shirt presenting a ghostly imprint of what’s hiding against the skin. When I’m feeling lonely or sad, the world before me dulls, and it takes something extraordinary to snap me out of it. Recently I’ve been struck by the scent of honeysuckles on a bush at the corner of my street, and despite my ache to get home, there’s an innate urge that turns me on my heels and brings my nose closer. I tuck myself between the bees and the flowers, for a moment, and I cross the street with heightened senses.

On my first evening, I decided to see a film on my own at the Tuschinski Theatre. I read in a coffee shop beforehand to kill time and felt slightly jarred at the sound of my voice when I ordered my coffee. Slipping back into my thoughts, I sat in a daze by the window on the top floor, watching bicycles whizzing by. The music playing over the speakers was in a language I didn’t know, so I only barely registered it beyond my concentration. When the barista came to tell me they were closing, the melody pierced through my consciousness, and it was a song by a band I loved when I was 15. This happened once before, on a solo coffee shop date in my hometown back in November — it was the same band, the same familiar trumpets that have always seemed to tear me out of my shell.

By the evening of my second day, I grew tired of the weight of my Airpods in my ears. No song sounded right, so I opened this fifth, muted sense and listened to the strange sounds of a city that was not mine. Sitting on the grass in Oosterpark, I was struck by the cawing of rose-ringed parakeets. It took a moment of attention, as their green feathers made them blend in seamlessly with the leaves of the tall tree above me, to the point where one couldn’t differentiate where the tree ended and the birds began. Rose-ringed parakeets, despite hailing from isolated tropical regions, are notoriously resilient to urbanisation. There’s something beautiful about the way they’ve taken back the city. The first shared, subconscious thought between Adam and Eve, the punch through the alienation: Yes, we could belong here, too. Here they are, fifty years later, a birdsong of survival echoing through manicured trees, freeing me from my gloved body.

“Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles” by Sally Wen Mao:

In Lijiang, the sign outside your hostel
glares: Ride alone, ride alone, ride
alone – it taunts you for the mileage
of your solitude, must be past

thousands, for you rode this plane
alone, this train alone, you’ll ride
this bus alone well into the summer night,
well into the next hamlet, town,

city, the next century, as the trees twitch
and the clouds wane and the tides
quiver and the galaxies tilt and the sun
spins us another lonely cycle, you’ll

wonder if this compass will ever change.
The sun doesn’t need more heat,
so why should you? The trees don’t need
to be close, so why should you?

After a sweaty bike ride in Vondelpark, I called my mom from a shadowed spot on the grass. “Aren’t you lonely?” she asked me, a concern both she and my dad had for weeks after I first told them my plans. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to share this with?” I took a bite from my pastry, and said only: “I’m sharing it with you, aren’t I?”

Despite being constantly reminded of my aloneness, I never felt lonely. It was the first time in weeks that loneliness wasn’t a central feeling, replaced instead by curiosity and pleasure. This was a welcomed surprise. So often I tend to confine myself within the limits of my gloved body, forgoing the breeze of discomfort for familiarity — a friend, a city I know, a chain restaurant. I grip onto it like the chewed-up paw of a childhood stuffed animal. To be alone, truly alone, means turning to the sky and letting the sunlight melt off the plastic, so that the air reaches my skin and the goosebumps rise as they should.

A Note

Hi, friends. This will be the last newsletter for a while. Devotions initially started as an exercise for me, a way to dip my toe back into writing. After two years, I’m beginning to feel less invigorated and a bit…exhausted. At the same time, I’m starting a long-form piece of writing that excites me, and I want to give it the attention it deserves. I’m struggling to meet these deadlines, and I’ve found I do my best work when I take my time. I want to write when I feel inspired. I don’t want it to feel like work, and you deserve me at my best.

So, I’ve decided to stop all billing of paid subscriptions and continue Devotions as a free publication. If you’ve been a paid subscriber, I can’t tell you how thankful I am. It baffles me that people are willing to pay for my work, and it’s given me so much encouragement and confidence. It just doesn’t feel right to accept it here. I hope instead you’ll save your money and buy a copy of my book in the future :-)

I hope this isn’t too disappointing— I will likely be back in the fall. In the meantime, I’ll continue to post snippets of new and archived writing on the Devotions Instagram.

Thank you, reader. Sincerely.

<3

Tara

(P.S. Of course, here’s an updated playlist.)