Under the Light of the Window Frames
The phone call came very early for a Saturday. The light was still thin, barely more than a gray suggestion along the edges of the curtains, and the city lay far away, muffled, as if Amsterdam were sleeping at the bottom of a lake. I had not heard his name in so long that for a moment I thought I had misunderstood. But it was his sister, her voice too small for what it carried, and she said my name as if she didn’t need to say anything else afterward.
She was right. She didn’t need to say anything else.
I stayed lying there. The sheet felt cool against my skin. Outside, a tram leaned into the bend of the Prinsengracht, that familiar metallic hum I had always heard without really listening, and now I could think of nothing else. The city that kept going. The wheels on the rails. The impossible ordinary.
Floriaan. I spoke his name out loud, softly, in the empty apartment. To feel whether he still existed somewhere. Whether there was still a place where the sound of him could live.
I had known him for almost ten years. We had found each other the way men like us usually do: carefully, sideways, through a friend who meant well and pushed too hard. I remember the first evening, a terrace in the Jordaan, the late September light orange and black in the windows across the street. He sat diagonally opposite me and listened more than he spoke, which was rare, and I felt his attention like something solid. A hand that did not touch me but was still there.
After that we spent a lot of time together in the city. That is perhaps the simplest way to say it, but it is not entirely accurate. We walked through the Jordaan on evenings when the cobblestones still held the warmth of the day beneath our feet. We stood on little bridges and looked at the water without saying anything that mattered. We drank beer on the sidewalk with friends and he would laugh then, his head slightly tilted, as if he were observing the conversation from a distance, as if he always stood just outside the center and wanted it exactly that way.
I learned his body without ever fully understanding it. The width of his shoulders. The way he used his hands when he explained something. A scar on his forearm that he never explained, and I never asked, because there were things we both guarded with silence.
That first week after the phone call, I walked. Not to get anywhere, but to escape the stillness. I followed the canals without a plan, looked at my reflection in the water that was always moving, never giving me back completely. The city was brutal in its indifference. Bicycles whizzed past my elbow. People carried flowers, groceries, children on their shoulders. A drunk Englishman laughed so loudly he had to hold on to a lamppost. I stood there like someone looking into a shop window from the street.
It was the fragments that haunted me. Not the great loss, that was too big to grasp, but the loose pieces that suddenly surfaced without warning. The smell of stagnant water and the memory of a bridge where we had stood waiting in the rain, his shoulder against mine. His voice when he explained something he wasn’t sure about himself, that hesitation in it, that willingness not to know. His hand on my shoulder the evening I told him I also fell for men, and how he said nothing, only nodded, and how that nod was worth more than all the words.
But I kept returning to one evening. Over and over, like a record needle falling back into the same groove.
It had been late summer. One of those nights when the heat only loosens after midnight, slow and reluctant, and the city smells of warm brick. We sat on the flat roof of his apartment, reached through a trapdoor he had secretly opened, not officially allowed but never checked. Amsterdam lay stretched out beneath us like a body at rest. The canals glittered. Somewhere in the Pijp a man was singing a drunkard’s song, faint and too far away to make out the words.
He had pulled off his T-shirt and laid it beside him. That was all: a gesture without meaning, just the heat, just comfort. But I saw the line of his back, the hollow above his hip, the play of light and shadow on his skin as he breathed slowly, and something in me grew quiet.
I had seen him without a shirt before. This was different.
We lay next to each other on the warm roofing, my arm almost against his, the heat of his skin noticeable without touch. There was a kind of tension in the air that had nothing to do with a storm, though the sky in the south bulged heavy and dark. I smelled his sweat, his skin, something warm and real that almost broke me in a certain way.
“Do you think it ever gets easier?” he asked.
His voice was low, on the border between sleepiness and seriousness. I turned my head toward him. He was staring up at a plane drifting slowly across the sky, its red light blinking like a question.
“This.” He shrugged, but there was a tension in the movement that said the opposite. “Saying who you are. Without it immediately changing everything.”
I wanted to say something reassuring. But I didn’t know that certainty. “Maybe,” I said finally. “Or maybe it becomes less important.”
He laughed softly, a sound that stayed low, almost to himself. “That sounds like someone who has already accepted it a little.”
I didn’t know if that was true. I only knew that in the warmth of that night, with the city beneath us and his body next to mine, there was no place on earth I would rather be.
My hand moved. So simple, so inevitable. My fingers touched his, a barely noticeable contact, and he didn’t pull away. His hand turned over and his fingers closed around mine, firm, without hesitation, as if he had been waiting. I felt the pressure of his palm, its warmth, the small imperfections of his skin.
We said nothing more. His thumb moved over my knuckles, back and forth, slowly and without hurry, an endless repetition that loosened something in my chest. The city breathed beneath us. Somewhere a boat engine, far away. The blinking light of the plane disappeared behind a cloud.
I could have kissed him. It would have been so simple. Turning my head toward him, bridging the distance that wasn’t large. I felt in everything that he would have allowed it. Maybe more than that. But I lay still, caught in my own hesitation, afraid to change the quality of this moment, to disturb this balance that was so fragile and so exactly right.
And so we stayed lying there, until the night cooled and we went inside without many words.
His sister called a week later. My name was in his phone, she said, and she thought I might want to pick up some things. She barely knew me. The fact that he had kept my name, somewhere in the small memory of his life, was already more than I had expected.
The stairwell smelled of cleaning product. The smell did something to my knees. I took the steps slowly, my hand on the railing, and tried not to think about how many times I had climbed this staircase without thinking about it.
Inside was the silence of someone who was no longer there. Not the silence of absence, but the silence of a presence that had stopped. His coat still hung on the hook. A glass on the table, with a thin line of dust along the rim. A book on the couch, open and spine up, like a bird with broken wings.
I walked around without touching anything. My eyes moved over his belongings, looking for something I couldn’t name. A letter, an explanation, a sign. The room was smaller than I remembered, or maybe the emptiness made it smaller.
Under his bed, not hidden but casually placed, I found a box.
Photos. Loose papers. Concert tickets. My hands moved slowly through the contents, as if every movement could disturb something. And then: a photo of the two of us on that roof.
We lay next to each other, our faces half-squinting in the light, our heads close together. Our hands intertwined, clearly visible, captured by someone who had seen it and said nothing about it. I had not known that anyone had photographed us. I had thought that night belonged only to us.
My fingers traced the contours of our bodies on the glossy paper. His arm. My hand. What lay between us, visible and real.
Under the photo, folded once, lay a note. Small handwriting, hurried, slanting slightly to the right.
I don’t know how to say this without ruining everything. Maybe that’s also why I never said it out loud. With you it feels different. Calmer. As if for a moment I don’t have to fight.
I’m afraid that if I speak it, it will disappear. Or that you will disappear.
But it’s already there. You know that too.
I’m sorry that I’m always quiet.
I read it several times. Each time again, as if the words might shift, might have a different meaning if I read them from another angle. But they stayed the same. So simple and so irreparable.
My throat was dry. My chest felt tight, full, as if something were pushing against the inside that was too big to contain. I thought of that night on the roof. Of his hand around mine. Of the space I had left between what I felt and what I did.
I could have turned around. I could have said his name. I could have begun.
The anger came first, fast and hot. At him, because he had waited. At myself, because I had done the same. But the anger had no foundation. Beneath it lay something else, softer and much heavier. Something that had no name but had always been there, in the way I had looked at him when he wasn’t looking, in the way I had remembered his voice while pretending I wasn’t.
I sat down on his bed. The sheet was cool, smooth, without imprints. I laid my hand flat on the fabric and thought of nothing, or of everything at once; it is hard to say where the difference lay.
The sun had climbed higher and now fell in slanted beams through the window. Dust particles danced in the light, visible and ungraspable, present and already vanishing. I held the note in my hand and felt how something in me shifted irrevocably. Not like a break. More like a settling, deep and slow, the way the ground of this city has always moved.
At the window I stood still for a long time.
Outside, a tourist boat glided through the canal, people on board with beer cans in their hands, laughter carrying over the water. Life, untouchable in its ordinary progression, without pause, without mercy.
I pressed my forehead against the glass. Cooler than I had expected.
“It was already there,” I said. Not to him, because he could not answer. More to the room, the dust particles, the light. To the space he had left behind and that I now filled for a moment with my presence.
My hand closed around the note. Not to hold it. To be carried by it. The tear that rolled down my cheek I only noticed later.
Outside the sky had cleared. The city lay sharp in the afternoon light, every detail clear: the facades, the bicycles, the trees already beginning to shed their leaves. I walked without hurry, my pace even, along the canal. An old man with a small dog nodded to me. I nodded back.
Floriaan is no longer here. That does not change.
But sometimes, when the light falls through a window in a certain way and the city briefly holds its breath between two sounds, I still feel the pressure of his hand around mine. His thumb moving slowly over my skin. The warmth of a summer night above the city.
Not as something that wants to return. As something that was always there. As something that truly happened, in a world that continued without knowing what was being held on that roof.
There, exactly in that space between what was said and what was not, he still lies next to me. And I hold his hand. And this time I do not let go.
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