“I wonder,” you said. “That doesn’t surprise me,” I answered. “How do you do this?” You were in the phase where you constantly had to lend an ear to your uncontrollable urge for searching. And now you were missing. “Baby, relax. Life can not be planned, it plans you.” I knew all my advice and cliches were true. At the same time I knew they didn’t reach you. It frustrated me. And it didn’t frustrate me. I’ll keep on talking to you, as long as it takes for you to apply all these things yourself. “I’m just lost. I know what you say is right, but I just seem incapable of doing something with it. Sorry for all this.” I wondered if you knew that you repeated this sentence just as often as you were chasing your own tail. I wasn’t worried. All the ingredients were there for the life you aspired. You just had to find that out yourself. “If you start to argue the argument, soon you have to relax twice too.” There was a painful smile on your face and I knew you wouldn’t hear me anymore. “Weird right, that you know everything you say is true, because you’ve been through it yourself, but you just can’t communicate it to someone else.” A girl sat down to my left, whom I had never seen before. She brought a guitar. “Totally right”, I said, while I must have looked at her with some question marks on my face. “You look like my tattoo”, she said while she showed me the back of her upper arm. It was a question mark with a circle around it. The insistence of asking her the meaning behind it was almost as big as the insistence not to. “You’d rather not know what it says, right?!”, she said. I looked to my right to see how you were doing and I just realized that you changed from second to third person. You were dancing, without being happy. “She looks nice when she dances.” My new neighbor just spoke my mind. “You’re good at it”, I said with half of a smile. “I stopped asking questions. The less I asked and wanted to ask the more answers came to me.” “Funny, right?”, she said. “And contradictory”, she added to it. “Isn’t that just life, funny and contradictory? What does your tattoo stand for?” “Right. And I’m not going to tell you.” She knew I wasn’t looking for answers anymore. Now it’s your turn. “The one question isn’t the other.” The music was loud and I don’t like shouting. “Shall we look for a place a little bit more quiet?” she asked. Meanwhile you were surrounded by our friends. You were good at entertaining. A little bit too good. Sometimes you entertained yourself away. Maybe that’s the reason why there wasn’t enough energy left for you. “Let’s go”, she whispered in my ear while she grabbed my hand. I looked at you to catch an approving glance, but you were too busy directing the group. It was a club with small corridors, mystical little corners and opportunities to get lost. “It’s such a labyrinth, don’t you think?! Just like my head. But now at least I don’t walk through it by myself”, the girl said. I still didn’t get why she brought her guitar. “Do you want to get lost together?”, I asked her. We sneaked into one of the cavities. There was just enough light to see that her eyes were sparkling. She looked like how Riva could be. Or maybe becomes. “I’ve been lost really bad. At the moment itself it was the worst thing there is. But in the end I didn’t want to miss it for the world. I know now. It was essential.” Her glance was almost cheerful. “Life is weird. I don’t think you want to try to catch it. Do you meditate?” “Sometimes”, I said, “In my own way.” “Me too,” she said. “My friends recommended me to do it. I understood that it’s something helpful. If it would have been other people than my friends to recommend it to me, I think I wouldn’t have done it. I don’t want people to tell me what to do. I’m not allergic to authority, but more the insistence to figure things out myself.” I wondered if it was her or me talking. “You have the same, don’t you?” I smiled. So did she. “The ongoing battle between letting go, holding on, recognizing your own patterns and willing to change them. Frustrating. Phenomenal. Destructive.” She was on fire. “You’re quiet”, she said. “I like to listen. And I like to think. On the one hand you want to explore everything yourself, but at the same time you want someone to give you all the answers. In that sense it’s not so bad to just follow, sense and see what fits you, right?” “Not at all. I think it can work quite good. For me it doesn’t. Nor for you.” She knew me. That was weird. And it wasn’t weird.

Jimmy Jansen, born and raised in Amsterdam where he currently resides, is an entrepreneur, writer, MC, poet, in both Dutch and English. Find out more about Jimmy here.

Photo: Moyan Brenn