Foreign Love in Amsterdam

I loved you the way one loves a cathedral with shattered stained glass, not knowing whether light would ever pass through again. On the bridge at Leidseplein, I held your hand like a prayer I never dared to utter. It was cold. But love, warmer than all the painted walls of Van Gogh. The tram passed between us like a final judgment. And we said nothing. Because sometimes silence is all we can give when our hearts bear too many scars written in dead languages. We loved each other between two stations, between a promise and a “maybe.” At Albert Heijn I bought you chocolate, and you smiled as if I had given you an entire life in a green wrapper. I saw you then in the empty church at Nieuwe Kerk, where a candle lit itself. Perhaps it was for us. Perhaps for those who never learned how to stay. And now, as the rain falls on the pavement where we once walked hand in hand, I miss the way you held my silence like a poem yet to begin. I loved you. In a foreign city, with a foreign heart, but with a light that came from Above, from a place where love never ends.