Regressions of a Grown Girl

Me and my friend would spend our twenties together in The Hague for a few years. I was 6 years older than her, in the middle of my twenties. She was in her beginning. We would spend the time drinking absurd amounts of beer and smoke absurd amounts of cigarettes in half-empty bars where we would become friends with mostly middle-aged men and manic, lonely homebodies. We would complain about the people around us but with a certain admiration for them at the same time, always recognizing their inner suffering or what we would like to call “A certain sadness in their eyes”. This term, “a certain sadness in the eyes” was something we would attribute to anyone who seemed to have some hidden inner turmoil. The term became significantly more important when talking about the people we found attractive and how this certain sadness would enhance this attractiveness. I suppose we desperately wanted to believe that there was something of substance within people underneath a seemingly flawless skin and well curated personal lore. We went to art school together; that is how we both found ourselves in this rather uninteresting town. A fake, or a “Puppet” town, where people only moved around on bikes, all of the houses were made of bricks, and the landscape being so flat it felt as if you could move into oblivion without the scenery changing one bit. All the neighborhoods had the same essential places, a dark dive bar with a fluorescent Heineken sign on the outside, an Albert Heijn grocery store, strangely nice second-hand shops, kebab shops, and some local Dutch restaurant where you could sit for hours, chugging beers and eating microwaved bitterballen for 7 euros.

We had one of our borderline manic nights on the Friday before. The next day, we had one of our usual “recaps”; the routine always went like this; I would wake up with a feeling of unrest and peace at the same time. Maybe take a shower, finally do the dishes that had been sitting on the counter since Thursday, go to the grocery store and shop for the week, pasta, pesto, steal some cheese and maybe buy a bunch of tulips if I felt rich. Then around 2 or 3 o’clock, she would call and ask if we should have a coffee since she’s in the neighborhood after shopping at one of these strangely nice second hand shops around where I live. 

The coffee date always started with one coffee each. Her “black coffee,” my “Black coffee with a little cold milk on the side.” Then the conversations would begin. They would concern the night prior, the people we had met, how they knew each other, what kind of conversations we had had with them, how we couldn’t believe we had had such a wild night yet another night, often two or three nights in a row. How we couldn’t entertain the thought of drinking again, or smoking another cigarette in our lives. Hereafter, the conversation would turn to more personal matters, often anecdotes from our past, about our parents or our sisters, (we are both big sisters with only one little sister, which we were convinced dramatically changed our unstoppable thirst for experience), stories about trips to different big cities in Europe and bizarre encounters with crazy people, rich people, and artists. We would always come to all kinds of conclusions and as the conversation went on we would start ordering beer, rolling up cigarettes. Conversations worth being written down. Conversations that unfortunately will disappear into the exile of the past and soon will be forgotten. I would always leave the conversations with a feeling that I had figured out something important, what this “important” was I wasn’t sure of, but something was sure; a feeling that I was on the right track, that I had what I needed and that I didn’t need to worry.

My friend was what I needed, and this is one of the things we would often conclude with “we couldn’t believe we had met such a fantastic person as each other in our lives.” And it was true, that’s probably why these meetings made me give in to the something mysterious I was looking for. Life in my twenties had felt like a battlefield despite always having an unusually comfortable life. Just today on the phone, I had complained to my mother about how this unrest never ends. She had only responded with “it’s probably a human experience,” she was tired of my restlessness, and I couldn’t blame her. These anxieties had followed me through a whole life, and they were probably created in a desire for adversity - since the external world technically wasn’t against me.

Meeting this friend, who came from London and had surrounded herself with a completely different group of people than me but at the same time had such a similar view of reality, was like seeing yourself in a mirror from a parallel universe - a universe I also looked up to and wished I was a part of. To see a person I looked up to and valued so much, have the same reflections, the same desires, and agree with my unhappy view of reality meant that I couldn’t be all that far from her. We struggled with the same things, and even though I had lived half a decade more as an adult, she was mature enough for my kickstart to matter. She always gave too much effort, in friends, love, family, and general existence. She wished for too much, and I could agree with that. Nothing was enough, no matter how much one could appreciate the small things in the moment, the enticing potential fun was a motor to keep us going. Continue until potential burnout. That’s why we met this Sunday, after spending a whole day in bed. Because of this driving force that took us to an exhibition opening on Friday. this driving force that got us to drink as many of the free bottled beers as possible. the same force that restlessly got us to talk to all the new faces at the gallery and take them to a bar with even more new faces. The same force that got us to stroll through The Hague’s most gloomy area and over to an afterparty where the guests had all fallen asleep in a bundle on the living room floor. The same force that then took us home to my apartment to talk about our most personal experiences, invite a classmate at 6 in the morning, buy beer when the store opened, and continue the conversation until three in the afternoon. It felt right at the moment, it felt as if I was fighting for life. To see how long one could endure, to see how long one could chase pleasure until there were only crumbs left, and even then I would devour the crumbs like we devoured all the residue beer in all of the empty beer cans on my coffee table.

The thought of my own freedom has been like a stick in a bicycle wheel since Christmas. My mother and I have been the first women, perhaps ever, in a whole series of women since the beginning of time who had the privilege to live alone. Who could invite strangers up to the apartment. Who could sit there in the absence of family obligations, children, and female duties, until three o’clock the next day. Who can around the city streets alone without a chaperone and not feel ashamed. We can move alone to Europe and become friends with exactly who we wanted, people from all sides of the globe. My inner restlessness and drive to burn the candle at both ends had become both a feminist and an existential struggle. I could carry my loneliness with pride. My empty bed and quiet apartment became the palace of an independent woman. I could see myself alongside Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf with their loneliness and sadness and hope that it wouldn’t also kill me. Fortunately, I am freer than they were, than they could ever have been, and I must therefore carry this freedom as a banner. For many years, I had wanted to be like my friends back home in Norway, with their long-lasting love affairs, apartments, and purchases of solid furniture at flea markets, early to bed on Saturdays, wine evenings instead of gin and tonic all nighters., the dream of a home base instead of the idea of being a wandering vagabond, without nicotine addiction and alcohol abuse, without the desire to be an artistic soul, a creative one, a witness to the possible “free” life whatever freedom actually entails. In the company of my new friend, I could finally own my outsider status and rather see myself as lucky. As if I got the opportunity they didn’t get; the opportunity to be more than a woman, more than what my biological history wanted for me. “First and foremost, I am truly a fan of you,” my former lover said to me as we went our separate ways. In the time that followed, I understood that this sentence described just that. I wasn’t a woman for him, not a woman who could become a wife or even a proper girlfriend. I reflected a masculine freedom he could never have, a freedom so masculine and groundbreaking that if a woman could have it, it must mirror such a strong inner drive that I too could give up a social and biological essence. Still, I felt it, I felt alienated from what is expected of me, what has been expected of women for centuries. In one of the conversations from Friday, a girl and I concluded that our ability to admire our female friendships was the same ability that made nuns go into a convent. That the presence of a woman who understands you like maybe only a woman can, was enough to not enter into relationships with men. That relationship had to be so free and uncommitted that they usually couldn’t be a safe one. Although men could maintain their freedom in relation to a woman, women’s liberation had not come far enough to be equal for both genders. A woman in 2024 will struggle if she clings to such self-will; she will be labeled as someone who wants to have her cake and eat it too.

That’s why me and my friend decided this Sunday that we would order ourselves both the coffees and the beers, smoke the cigarettes and eat every snack on the menu. Just because we could, I guess.