Midnight in Amsterdam.

Actually now, it's 2AM.

At this very typing moment, a man is spilling his fountain of obscenities outside my window. He sometimes leaves small bites of burgers on the mailbox alongside crushed beer cans, but tonight he’s got tunnel vision. We’ve waved in the daylight, but we’ve never arrived at words, because he’s usually in a hell that requires verbal solitude.

I’m in a dark cave by myself at this moment, but two stories up. I’m not screaming on the sidewalk, but my brain has sent out riot cops to beat me with their guns. I have a repetitive image and sound, the crisp thud of a bird hitting the glass sliding door at my Bana’s house. The bird was on a commute, supremely confident, her beak glossy and jutting out. The freshly cleaned glass at the top of the hill tricked her, shiny and enticing, nearly invisible, feet from the perfectly small climbing tree. If the bird was a football player, she suffered CTE, no book deals or interviews, and flew away unceremoniously in zig-zags, an new shape for her wings.

The man is no longer screaming outside my window, he’s moved onto a nearby block, resting. A couple ambles down the street leaning to and fro, whispers so loud I can hear them naming college friends, some mild disapproval at a recent engagement. The cop in my head has quieted down, but the beating remains, detritus of death and destruction, an arsenic-laced waterfall of violent images, whether lived or witnessed. An outpouring of ghosts I cannot shut down. I feel a deep jealousy for people who aren’t visual, whose brains don’t suck up and replay exposures on repeat.

I remember posting an argument against political snuff film culture ten years ago, the way people pass out dead bodies online as a form of social justice currency. I remember being yelled at by a man I’d only met once. He escalated in a predictable way, first calling me “naive” and eventually a “dumb bitch” for suggesting it might be mentally corrosive to livestream executions day-in and day-out. That there must be some balance between erasing brutal truths of injustice, and dehumanizing the dead once more, their families again, by transforming people’s memories into communal epitaphs, by collaging victims of police brutality into avatars, by turning genocides into hashtags.

How do we employ the tools we have (the internet, the hallway of words mediated by ads and wildly fluctuating algorithms) to access each other? To sound the alarms? To reach past the flattening of our computers into real-life work? The man who called me a bitch said I was skirting the issue of “raising awareness,” that real life and the internet are separate and should be discussed as such. Now he uses the r-word and posts online about how the CDC was lying to us all in 2020, and I’m arguing with a cop in my head about the slideshow of horrors he blasts in the squad car, and whether I’m innately evil for seeing corpses in my periphery.

It is not helpful for my brain’s sorting system, that for decades, I was told my normal human emotions were innately sinful - a horrific scourge of shame that could only be cleansed by an invisible spirit who was conveniently invested in a pastor’s pocketbook. Depression was a manifestation of demons, intellectual curiosity was a symptom of arrogance, even compassion, when spent wrong, could be conflated with promiscuity. No matter how absurd the symptoms, the accusations, being pounded with spiritual psychosis for decades will stress-test your brain, if nothing else, from the osmosis of repetition. You can reject the pack of cigarettes wholesale, but the smoky air inside the house will push the limits of your lungs. If they never get fresh air, they might collapse from the damage. So when a constable beats you with a gun full of horrific images and memories, then tells you you’re a sicko for having those memories, it’s best to physically distance from the accusations, to reject the legalism of the morbid circus you’ve been drafted into.

Earlier today, I was in heaven, and so was the man outside my window. We all were, because Amsterdam in June like stepping into an animation, the sun kisses everyone like an enthusiastic party guest, refusing to leave until almost midnight, before popping back in for more at 4AM. Riding my bike to the grocery store through the old alleyways was filmic, I swerved around an abandoned flower bouquet, a rat carcass, around the missing cobblestone at war with my front wheel. I glided onto the street, over the tram stop, past the hidden dumpling place with the perfect chili oil. I felt rays of Vitamin D speed-running into my cheeks like Naruto.

I almost hit a tourist family out of road rage toward their inability to STAY ON THE SIDEWALK, but even that was twee, a Matt and Kim song punctuated by loose dogs, a living room laugh-track moment, nauseatingly sunny. If I hit the family with my bike, I would’ve absorbed the injuries from the sheer gravity of the bike, gently strangled by my Omafiets. They would’ve walked away laughing, with a scrape, emboldened by the authentic experience. They could’ve joked about it on their family blog, the asshole in the bike lane, and their cousins would’ve roasted me for being so grumpy on such a gorgeous day.