Amsterdam

MONDAY, May 19, 2025

I’d been drinking a lot of iced Hojicha and matcha lattes these days. We bought six cartons of vanilla-flavored oat, pea, and almond mylk from Jumbo last week, and these days, after work, I’d whip up my favorite concoction: a cup of Hojicha or matcha I’d left in the fridge for a day, loads of ice cubes, liquid arenga sugar or hazelnut syrup, and vanilla mylk to fill up a Mason jar.

The sun had been going strong that spring, and there were times when I arrived home feeling as if I had gotten sunburned (was it even possible?). The sensation reminded me of those times when, as a child, I sat in the passenger’s seat of our red pickup, drowsy after a day at the swimming pool, feeling the heat of the day’s sun radiating from my skin. The smell of chlorine made me feel as if I weren’t made for this world—that I came from a different place, a different time, a different universe.

Probably that was why I always had this feeling of missing something I couldn’t explain: missing a place I had never been, missing people I had never met, missing a time I had never lived.

Amsterdam

TUESDAY, May 20, 2025

I couldn’t stop reading The Waves. I started last autumn, but I didn’t feel like it was the right time, and I was right. I started again on Sunday evening and felt like I was in a dream. It was so beautiful, tender, and atmospheric: the description of the sun in the sky, where the light hit, and how the waves mimicked the stages of life of the characters we were about to read. It was a poetic foreshadowing of what was to come.

The narrative structure was brilliant.

I took so many notes, bookmarked so many pages, and underlined so many passages. The way the story unfolded through soliloquies—only soliloquies—reminded me of those documentaries, when you wanted to tell an event (or a crime!) through different people’s recollections. One by one, they sat in a room, looked at the camera, answered some questions: who they were, where they were leading up to the event, how they got involved/witnessed what happened, what their relationship was to those involved in the event, and how their lives changed afterward.

In The Waves, we saw everyone’s lives from each other’s perspectives, just as in real life: we knew our version of the story or someone else’s version of the story, but never the whole story.

Amsterdam

WEDNESDAY, May 21, 2025

I left the office early that day and walked to Spui for my paperback copy of July’s All Fours. Then I treated myself to a solo lunch at Takumi, featuring steamed white rice, spicy fried tofu, and ebi furai. I was an hour late for lunch, so I was hungry and ate gratefully while watching people pass by on Kinkerstraat. It was nice just to eat and zone out, letting my mind rest for a bit. I couldn’t sleep the night before; my mind was full of to-do lists for the shop before we flew to Italy that Friday—things I needed to do, content I needed to film, and products I needed to upload. So, it might not have been a surprise that I woke up with only 9 out of 100 body battery that morning.

After lunch, I walked home slowly, enjoying the sun. I stopped by the Coffee District in the neighborhood for an iced matcha latte, sipping it while reading The Waves. I was almost finished, with only around 20 pages left.

Amsterdam

THURSDAY, May 22, 2025

It was raining on our way to the office today, and the wind was so strong that we saw some bicycles toppled on the sidewalk. On our way home, D slowed down, and our scooter scooted to the right, and I asked, “Are you thinking of stopping at Vlaamsch Broodhuys?”—and he said, “Well, yes, how did you know?”

Well, it was pretty obvious, really.

He got a huge focaccia with sea salt and rosemary, one whole piece, bigger than his head, and wanted me to take a picture of him eating it in front of the bakery.

I started packing my luggage as soon as we arrived home. It was funny that the first thought that crossed my mind was which journaling supplies I would pack, followed by which books I wanted to bring. This week’s writing exercise was about a narrator looking back at a cataclysmic event inspired by a piece from Diaz, so I guessed it would be fitting to bring Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea—and I thought I must also have something by Ferrante since we would be in Italy, so I popped in The Days of Abandonment; and lastly, for this month’s study after finishing The Waves, a beautiful copy of Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name—a Picador edition designed by Na Kim—that I found at the bookstore the other day. It was the only Picador copy on the shelf, and when I took it, I felt smug.

Amsterdam

FRIDAY, May 23, 2025

I woke up at 4:30 that morning while D was still fast asleep and went to the kitchen to make myself a cup of flat white with banana mylk. The house was quiet, and the neighbors’ houses were still dark. I sat at the dining table, sipping my coffee while scribbling in my journal about the wonderful feeling of being alone but not completely alone. It was like having your bubble that separated you from the rest of the world. It was one of the most peaceful moments I’d ever had in Amsterdam in years. I told myself I wouldn’t mind waking up this early if I could have this feeling now and then. I suppose it reminded me of who I once was and who I wanted to become.

***

There were six of us in the van: D, Mamma, Aunt B, Uncle G, D’s brother, S, and me. We landed at Linate (my luggage arrived first at the luggage belt, the only luggage… then after 15 odd minutes, everybody else’s luggage started showing up) and hopped onto the van to begin our adventure to Brisighella, where we’d be stationed for the duration of Il Passatore 100-km race. We stopped for lunch outside Modena, in Osteria Antica Anna e Marco, which was set in what seemed to be an old farmhouse. The building and interior were gorgeous, and it was so cool inside.

It was raining when we stopped in Faenza to pick up D’s race number (837), and we arrived in Brisighella late afternoon.

Our stay was also in an old farmhouse, Casa di Otello, with a gorgeous, uninterrupted view of the rolling green hills of Toscana. Two young and curious cats and a donkey with beautiful eyes were also on the premises, and I just found out that a donkey sounded like a rusty water pump.

Standing before our bedroom window and soaking in the green hills around me, I thought, “I can see myself living here.”

Brisighella

SATURDAY, May 24, 2025

I prepared rice and chicken for D’s pre-race meals in the morning. Then we hopped into the van and headed to Firenze for D’s starting line. We dropped him near the Duomo and made our way to Borgo San Lorenzo for D’s first stop (30 km), where Uncle G would follow him with his bicycle through the night, carrying water, gels, and other supplies. I saw M and A passing this checkpoint and high-fiving them, and met E a bit further down—she was still waiting for R to pass this point.

Aunt B drove our van back to Brisighella through the steep and curvy Strada Provinciale roads. The view was beautiful, but the many curves we had to pass for three and a half hours straight made me nauseous. Aunt B was unaffected—she was impressive like that.

At 3:45 a.m., I made some coffee for Aunt B, as she would drive us to Faenza to pick up D at the 100-km finish line. It was so cold (6 degrees Celsius early in the morning) as we waited at the piazza with the crowds. We finally saw D running toward us, and he was looking good. His second time finishing the Il Passatore race, about 2 hours earlier than last year.

Brisighella

SUNDAY, May 25, 2025

We were all half-asleep, half-awake the whole day, not having had enough time to sleep the day before. Only Aunt B and Uncle G were still energized enough to see Torre dell’Orologio, the clock tower of Brisighella, after dropping us off at our farmstay.

I drifted in and out of sleep the whole day, waking up every few hours to sip water or nibble my insalata di polpo from the fridge. Today was so hot that I woke up sweaty from my frequent naps, but then I would enter the kitchen and feel cold, so I needed to run upstairs to grab my sweater.

In the afternoon, we all lay down on the grass and the sunbed, overlooking the green hills before us, taking in the majestic view. The two cats ran around us, playful and curious.

Dinner took place at Cantina del Bonsignore, where last year’s post-race dinner was held, and we met everyone there: A and R, who managed to finish the race, and M and E, the supporting crew. A would lose one of her nails, which had been peeled off during the race, but she was pretty stoic about it. R told us a funny story about running through the night with his headlamp—the light attracted a swarm of flying insects to his forehead, so he felt like he was in a cartoon movie: when someone just got hit in the head and saw a constellation of stars spinning above.