Intimacies

by Katie Kitamura

That comfort was alien to me, we had moved so frequently when I was young that there was no one place I would think of as my childhood home, we were mostly arriving and then leaving, those years were all motion.

I had been on the tram many times of course, but somehow this journey felt subtly different, the city frequently changed before my eyes but now I felt an attachment I had sought but not previously felt, it was as if an anchor had been dropped. I stepped off not too far from the Mauritshuis and stood for a moment in the crush of pedestrians and tourists. I walked down a street at random, and realized it had been some time since I had moved through the city in this way, with this leisure and freedom.

That night, I ventured out to get something to eat, walking to the closest Chinese restaurant. When I entered, the young woman at the register addressed me in Mandarin, her manner hopeful. Her face clouded over when I shook my head and from that point she treated me with greater disdain than seemed normal. I thought—I want to go home. I want to be in a place that feels like home. Where that was, I did not know.