The week after the Crossing Border Festival, I’m sitting in the Translators’ House in Amsterdam with two Dutch-to-English translators. It’s pouring; the rain is clattering against the windows of the extension. We have to raise our voices to be able to understand each other. The Translators’ House is in Oud-Zuid, near Oud-West, where I lived at one point. One of the translators lives near the house I shared with a bunch of other students. The other is eating a roll with hot sliced meat and satay sauce. It all feels Very Dutch and I find that endearing.

Nine years ago I lived in six square meters, on the third floor of an old mansion on Bosboom Toussaintstraat, across the corner from Overtoom. I remember how I used to put rolled-up towels on the windowsill in winter, pushed up against the glass to try and at least keep some of the cold out. I slept up on a loft that you had to climb wooden steps to get to, and beneath it was my desk with a chair. Because my bed up on the loft was above the window, I always slept in pitch darkness and often found myself waking up well into the afternoon, even on days when I had places to be. My clothes were stored in the cupboard beneath the stairs and whenever a load of laundry was going through the spin cycle, all the things on my desk would judder onto the floor because the cupboard that housed the washing machine shared a wall with my room.

I’m thinking about all this as I walk out onto Museumplein after my meeting. I still associate Amsterdam with these cramped living conditions, but here it’s wide and open. I never went to Museumplein back then. I duck into a supermarket to buy some food. When I resurface from my shopping expedition, the sun has broken through the clouds and Amsterdam is sparkling in all its sodden glory. As tends to happen in places I know from the past, I find myself suddenly struck by the city’s charm, and I decide to walk to my old neighborhood.

The Asian supermarket is still there, around the corner from the main drag, as is the bakery where you can get your coffee to go. I stop in front of the psychiatric hospital at the T-junction and look at the absurd artwork on the roof: a sculpture of a human figure perched on a ladder that reaches into the sky. Creepy, I think to myself, but just like I used to, I wonder what Amsterdam would look like from up there. The city would probably seem a lot more orderly than it does down on the ground.

It’s been half a month since Crossing Border. During the festival I felt agitated and distracted. There was too much going on outside of it. I wanted quiet. I wanted to be able to think. That first winter in Amsterdam, when I walked back and forth between my home and the university in a daze, I felt like this too. The city reached me in flashes, and I couldn’t find any rhyme or reason to it. Ultimately, the need to withdraw became the way I was able to find my feet. I structured my days around the speed of my brain. The same was true during the festival in The Hague.

When I turn into my old street, unlike in the past, the parking lot is filled with a row of SUVs. One of the houses has just been renovated, its façade sterile among the old buildings. New bicycles are parked in front of the door. People are walking past, people I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re living on my old street; they don’t know if I ever lived here. I recognize the Tunisian restaurant, the Italian place a few doors down, the side streets, everything that’s changed. A young woman whizzes past on a bicycle—maybe she’s on her way to the university. I’m craving a coffee. Time to stop by the bakery. I know where it is. I feel like a tourist, just like I did back in The Hague, in a city I’ve known for a long time. It’s not necessarily a bad feeling.

Currently a sixty-five-year-old woman in a blue Toyota is on her way to Arnhem to pick up the keys to my apartment in North Rotterdam. My partner accidentally put them in her bag and traveled to the other side of the country with them. When she told me, I started to cry, because I was tired from the last three weeks of working non-stop and not being able to sleep in my own bed.
‘I’ll go,’ the sixty-five-year-old woman immediately said. We were sitting in her apartment. She walked to the kitchen, took out a chopping board and made three sandwiches: one with jam, one with cheese and one with salami. She put them in a plastic bag and put the plastic bag in her purse.

When the sixty-five-year-old woman had driven away, I walked to the jeweler’s. I wanted to let myself be comforted by the gold. Another day away from home, my heart cried, another day without your own bed, the smell of your plants, the burning of your pillar candles. When I’m tired, I become childish, and when I become childish, I feel sorry for myself. So I let myself go. I went into the store and studied necklaces, stud earrings, rings with diamonds and bracelets covered in elegant engravings. I imagined how they would look on me and resolved that, when I’d grown rich, I would pile on the precious metal. The woman behind the counter surveyed me with sharp eyes: I had bags under my eyes, was wet from the rain, was wandering around her territory without intending to buy anything. The woman announced she wanted to close at three o’clock. I said I thought that was a weird time. It’s Sunday, she said, and left it at that.

When I was back outside, I walked back into the residential neighborhood, past a ditch full of ducks, to kill more time. It started raining and I began to feel sick. A goose screamed at me and I grabbed a branch, hurled it at the creature and missed. Then I took the keys to the sixty-five-year-old woman’s apartment from my coat pocket, walked to the house with the keys firmly clutched in my hand and went to work. It will be some time before the sixty-five-year-old woman can press the keys to my house into my hand. I imagine her stopping at a gas station somewhere between The Hague and Utrecht, getting out and eating the cheese sandwich that she packed for herself, leaning against the car, in the wind and rain, looking at pastures with cows and ditches. She probably won’t do that—she’s probably not standing there staring proudly into the middle distance, but I hope she is. Maybe she’ll drive past an accident on the highway, grotesque and smelling of burning motor oil. Or she’ll see horses galloping along with her, jumping over the gates between the pastures, following her until the end of the farmland. Maybe she’ll buy a milkshake on the way, or eat a schnitzel in a highway restaurant—after all, she has plenty of time to make the trip.

When I reread the pieces I wrote over the past few days, I notice that I quoted someone in every blog. Apparently I need quotation marks, hooks to hang my thoughts on. I wonder how the sixty-five-year-old woman feels about that. If it were up to me, she’ll pour herself a large scotch after returning from her journey, order a steaming pizza with extra cheese, watch her favorite British crime show with her feet up on the coffee table. When I’m gone, finally on my way home, she’ll read the blogs on the festival website—silently, attentively. When I ask her on WhatsApp what she thinks, she’ll be honest.
‘I thought yours were very nice,’ she’ll say. ‘But the ones by the Palestinian writer were the best.’

The Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière once said that there is nothing more false than real life. The more I try to get close to myself, he explained to his interviewer, the more I’m hiding something. So you’ve stopped counting the possible exits in every room. Apparently there’s no escaping anything, at the end of the day. Instead, you sit in a coffee shop enjoying a sumptuous decaf experience. You decide to pass on schmoozy drinks while you wait to hear back from your sick mother. Editors, literary agents and writers walk past without knowing you’re there. That makes you feel like you’re playing hooky, but you don’t make much of an effort to go unnoticed. You order cheesecake instead.

A spoken-word artist you’re friends with sends you a message: at the festival you’re currently avoiding, she got mistaken for you yet again. You snort, reading her text. It seems you’re at the festival after all—in someone else’s body. You are here in the coffee shop too, invisible to everyone else. They do look inside, but they don’t see you.

Later, when you’ve finished your coffee, you’re leaning over the counter at The Hague Tailor – Clothing Repairs & Dry Cleaning with two other writers who are also playing hooky, looking at security footage stored in the cloud on an employee’s iPhone. They need to know if someone left a pair of headphones here yesterday, during a fitting. Headphones are important, someone says. You agree with that. You take out your own phone and film the one that’s lying on the counter showing the movements of the person next to you, here in this place, except one day earlier, in track pants, arms wide while someone bustles around her with a measuring tape.

Dany Laferrière also defines his work as a continual present. It’s the only time that exists, he says. ‘The past is found in memory, and I don’t trust memory.’ You write this down in the Notes app on your phone so that you can use the quote later. Keep track of your thoughts, the app’s welcome message says. Capture valuable ideas quickly in Notes whenever inspiration strikes. There’s no escaping the continual present. The past is playing on a screen and takes place in the empty space next to you. You can fast-forward the past to get to the present. The Hague is drizzle on oil, Chinatown is an endless succession of order numbers and time comes billowing out through the open doors into the wet streets. You’re at a literary festival in the guise of someone else. You’re at the dry cleaner’s, recording a video, in front of the strip curtain outside Ming Kee Fastfood, smoking, and at a coffee shop, avoiding writers. Literature is intruding upon this city, you think to yourself. Inspiration could strike at any moment. The present lies in waiting, ready to pounce.

In the evening, you eat with relatives in a high-rise. Your mother is still sick. You play a card game that you didn’t know, but that reminds you of every other card game you’ve ever played. The familiar moves repeat themselves: you start to sweat, don’t know what you’re doing. You are suspicious of the other players, get worked up, see how you might be able to win and end up losing all the same.

We’re on the run, in this dream. My partner knows a safe house we can go to, somewhere in a suburb in Delft. There’s something there that will save us. Don’t forget to take the key, my partner says, and I watch myself forgetting it. An out-of-body experience, except in a dream. The key is still lying in the tray on the table when I leave the office building and hurry to Delft. Once I get there: panic. My partner has to come and bring me the key. This is the moment in the story when I know our plan is going to fail. In movies this is the point where your phone will ring or someone will come bursting into the room. ‘We’ve been compromised,’ they’ll say. Usually I’m the one saying that, feeling that.

We’re standing in the parking lot in front of the run-down ’60s tower block. Students and grimy men walk in and out, get on their bicycles, carry bags of groceries inside. I hear a bunch of keys clattering to the ground, and I start to sweat. As I’m dreaming, I know I’m also perspiring in my sleep, in my hotel bed. But the dream must go on. I have no time for reality. I count the number of doors that soldiers could come storming through, or slimy monsters, gang members with knives. There are six garage doors, the main entrance, an emergency exit. From up on the walkways any idiot could see us. Or shoot us through the head.
“Hurry!” I shout at my partner. We don’t see anyone in the stairwell, which smells like fresh piss. I take the stairs two at a time.

She opens the door to the apartment. The interior of the safe house, the layout of the space, looks a lot like the building where my best friend and I lived as property guardians seven years ago. In the movie Inception, Leonardo Dicaprio says to Ellen Page, “Never draw from memory, always imagine new places.” The fact that I recognize the décor of the apartment is deeply worrying to me. Even the crack in the hardwood floor is the same—the way it runs straight through the living-room area.

Just as we’re grabbing some important documents from the filing cabinet by the window, an enormous gold sphere comes crashing through the plaster, the size of a wrecking ball. It shatters the roof. Rubble and concrete plummet through the floor, straight into the apartment below us. We barely manage to avoid the hole that swallows up the furniture. Then we run out onto the walkway. We have to jump. I’m starting to wake up. This part isn’t believable, my head says. We run toward the water. People are shooting at us. When I look around, I see that my partner is crying as she runs. Behind her: clouds of dust, fire. Her hair is white with ash. Her mouth is open, brown-red blood crusted on her lower lip. The tears form cracks in the dirt on her face. Armageddon. Thunder and lightning and the shadow of something huge, eclipsing the world behind her.

Now I wake up. Last night, in the lobby of the Mercure Hotel, I was standing in front of the automatic sliding doors talking to a Dutch-to-English translator. I was standing slightly too close to the glass, so that every time I moved my hands the doors slid open automatically, sucking cold air into the building. In the restaurant where we went on to have dinner, I counted the opportunities for escape: via the patio out back and then over the low wall, or I could excuse myself to go to the restroom and slip out through the entrance. The kitchen, possibly. I could hide in the dropped ceiling.

Nothing gives you peace of mind like having an escape plan. Between the appetizer and the entrée, I walked to a corner store with a translator and another writer and bought a pack of cigarettes. I could have stopped to tie my shoelace, hung back, ducked into an alley. I could have run onto a tram, but I didn’t.

In 1984 an interviewer from The Paris Review asked James Baldwin whether he believed there was such a thing as a “community of writers.”
“No. I’ve never seen one in any case . . . and I don’t think any writer ever has,” Baldwin replied. Writing a blog feels dirty. Suddenly my take on things is visible, because it is no longer woven into fiction, into poems. Hi, I’m Simone and I don’t know what I’m doing. Writers writing about writing and writers writing about being a writer in different places… I’m not very interested in myself when I’m writing, or in my own lack of insight. And yet I wander through city centers, eat in restaurants I didn’t choose myself, read my poetry, sleep in strange beds, get mistaken for other lady poets with black poetry collections. Those experiences don’t disappear. They ferment and become valuable.

A boy I went to art school with once said he felt like less of a writer when he was writing than when he was wandering the aisles of the grocery store. He disappeared in the course of the first year and never came back. But what he said stayed with me. Right now I’m in Ghent. Here in the hotel, I mainly sit in bed reading and working, thinking while I stare at a porcelain facsimile of a fruit basket. It’s sitting on the mantelpiece across from my bed, next to the scented candle I brought with me to make this place feel a little more my own. I texted a friend saying, I’m super lonely. She replied: wasn’t that the whole point of this trip? Well.

The benefit of travel usually doesn’t announce itself eloquently at the right moment—at least not to me. And yet recently, on a working trip to Cape Town, I found myself crying on a street corner. I did an awful lot of crying in South Africa. I cried in taxis and at breakfast and by the pool while drinking a mocktail. I was moved by how liberating poetry seemed to be for the artists and thinkers in that country, by how much it affected me, being there. The urgency that literature had—even for me. That urgency did in fact create a sense of community, and I felt that too. But as I felt it, I was taking my notes. I was filing things away. I was a part of it, but also outside of it—wordless, observing.

Now, in Ghent, it’s October and raining every day. In the evenings, I have a beer in bed while watching TV. In the mornings I read Toni Morrison’s Sula. I’m a writer in bed and in the grocery store and while writing this. The experience ferments and becomes valuable.

After Ghent, I will go on to Crossing Border in The Hague, where I’ll have to turn my experiences—or at least what’s on my mind—into a blog. It kind of makes me panic. In the same interview with The Paris Review, James Baldwin said, “The first person is the most terrifying view of all.” A community of writers. An apprehensive me. Unreliable direct statements with no opportunity for rebuttal. The most unfortunate combination of factors. I will be a writer, writing at a festival.