What if we’d grown into that together, instead of alone.
It’s easy to romanticise it. Two younger versions of us, falling fast, loving recklessly.
No ghosts. No scars. Only summer heat and the world wide open.
But then I think, maybe we wouldn’t have known how to handle each other back then. Maybe we needed those brutal detours. The loneliness. The pain. Maybe that road has changed us into people who can actually hold what we have now. Who know how to stay, take responsibility and actually take care of each other.
So what if this is exactly how it was always meant to unfold? Raised by life separately, broken and rebuilt in different cities, so that when we finally met, we were ready for each other.
Even if it comes with a heavy past, with the pain we don’t show, it’s still worth it.
Every second of every night I laid on the floor, wrecked and alone. If this is where it led? Man. I’d pay that price over and over again.
I tug my scarf tighter.
Yosh keeps rattling off unhinged sentences about God knows what, jumping from one unfinished subject to the next. I love it when he gets like this. A bit crazy, a bit manic. He usually calms me down and I need that, but sometimes he’s different. I don’t know how, but he gives me the fire and chaos I fucking live for.
Out of nowhere, his hands clamp onto my shoulders, a quick graze of his teeth on my neck. What the hell?
“You need to steal one back.”
He runs off like he’s just nicked a jewellery store’s emeralds. Which wouldn’t surprise me. Yosh is a magpie when it comes to beautiful and shiny things.
I sprint after him, wondering how the hell 34 suddenly feels more like twelve. But you know what? There aren’t any rules for how you’re allowed to feel. Right now, age feels optional.
“Yeah, keep running! You don’t even know where to go!” I shout after him, playing my only card. There’s no universe where I outrun him. Yosh does half-marathons before breakfast, and I can’t even make it to the kettle before eight.
Every now and then he lets me get close, only to dart off chuckling, and circling as I'm about to catch him.
I chase him around the corner and throw myself onto his back, kissing the spot behind his ear I know makes him weak and hard within seconds.
People are staring, so I drop back to the pavement quickly. Yosh has gone still beside me, his attention fixed on the spectacle in front of us.
A swimming sea of lights reflects in his eyes, the wonder in his expression is worth everything. It’s pure, childlike; something I’ve never seen in him before.
I squeeze his hand. “Beautiful isn’t it?”
“It’s like a fairytale.”
I settle my hands on his shoulders and take in everything in front of our eyes.
The ice skate rink, the million Christmas lights in the trees around us. In the background is theI Love Amsterdam signin front of the city’s iconicRijksmuseumthat I can imagine looks like a royal palace to Yosh. There are wooden stalls next to the rink where they sell hot chocolate and probably Belgianwaffles by the smell of it. After months in the tropics, I’d almost forgotten what the dark, cozy days before Christmas feel like. What they smell like. I’m instantly reminded.
I nod at the rink. “You know how to skate?”
Yosh spins around, eyebrows high. “What!? Ice skating? You’re serious?”
“Don’t tell me you can’t, love.”
His eyes flick to the rink and back. “Never. Not once.”
“Roller skating then?”
He shakes his head. “Never.”
I tug his hand, already pulling him forward. “Come on. You throw me on a board every weekend. Now it’s my turn.”
“God, this is going to end with broken bones,” he mutters, but he lets me drag him along.
