journal entries from Brussels

on subleasing, being alone in a new city, and the belgian capital

i’m sitting in R’s bed in Uccle - the south eastern outskirts of Brussels - small as a toothpick in the third quadrant of the room i’m subleasing. it’s a share house with four other dazzlingly cool cats. the building is large - three floors with ceilings as deep as swimming pools. a garden that hosts foxes and a basement that hosts laundry. i’m trying to get out of my own way - but whats left then? rain? concrete? air? bliss?

5 march

there is something so intimate about subleasing a room. you (Contract-holder, resident, holy god, friend-of-friend, amorphous figure) pause your reality and I resume it, sleeping in your sheets, observing your decor, watering your plants. i slip into your life at a moment when your material base is left alone long enough for it to logistically make sense. you go exploring and filling out other aspects of your personhood which you’ll bring back to this place that i temporarily occupy. i’m the lucky placeholder.

my room is on the ground floor of an old house with cracked tiled floors - stained with dirt and pasta sauce. i open up my blinds (apparently Belgians don’t do that very often) and watch people trot along Rue Beeckman. I see the tops of their umbrellas and the profiles of their faces and sometimes a whirl of hair and nose as they zip by on their bikes. R is an architect and his room explicitly states this fact. His book shelf is filled with architectural photography books, critiques of Bauhaus, niche art-magazines that are hand-bound. His room is so large that in one section he has curated a small exhibition of road work items - a polyvinyl tube with a light bulb on top, a convex traffic mirror, a red and yellow street sign with cut edges, various metal boxes, and a small segment of a broken radiator, for good measure. A standing lamp illuminates these objects from above.

the cool cats are nice, welcoming from what i can understand. on my first night A answered the door - i had to wait outside for 10 minutes - she was on the phone. giving a nonchalant nod to me, i gathered context clues of how our relationship was gonna go. am i an invisible visitor? are we gonna be friends? somewhere in-between? sometimes it feels as though i can barely handle the vulnerability of wanting new connections, even though i desire them so badly. female friendships, that is.

on my first eve, A asked if i wanted to watch the news with her. it was in Flemish; i pretended like i knew more than i did. i sat on one couch and she on the other. the TV rested on the floor in a green box, propped up with stacks of art magazines and books. draw blinds were attached to the top of the box, so you can hide the screen if you’d like. old, crusty canvases stuck out from behind a red velvet couch. it was cold in the room from the garden door which seemed perpetually open.

First we watched “de afspraak” - a traditional news commentary where pundits sit around a round table and try to make sense about whats going on in the world. they sit in a circle and have an audience, so there opinions must mean something important. she asked me if i understood, i said some, that i knew what “regime change” meant, for example.

Then we watched a documentary on femicide in Belgium. more context clues - these cats are socially aware. M, another roommate, artsy colourful type, joined. they translated things at moments for me, which i appreciated but also felt a familiar guilt for taking up their psychic space - tasking them with the unspoken job of translating what was going on now and again. they let it go at some point. i didn’t need much translating to understand what had happened.

15 march

french words, at least the important ones like my neighbourhood (Uccle) are still taking shape in my mouth.

im riding in an uber with some amsterdam entourage, coming back from a night of musical experimentation in the loft-atelier space of an engineer who wants to give back to the creative world. we arrived at the function hungover in over sized t-shirts and long skirts and drank the people’s IPA. at some point we partook in other substances that made things inexplicably funny. at the end of the night my abs hurt from laughing, just like in high school.

on the next day when my entourage departed me at Globe metro station to head back to amsterdam, i felt a melancholy so strong i had to hold back tears. what now?

16 march

im getting more comfortable in my skin and in the skin of the house. my quarters, the cohesion, integration, whatever. with coffee and a willingness to touch creativity (god), i think i could survive anywhere. there are no ghosts in this house, but i have been having wild dreams. last night i dreamt that i downloaded porn onto my work laptop. really deranged porn…it was the mouth of a bashed-in skull that had begun to rot.

but really, i’m doing well. i went to bed last night feeling excited that i’m still here, and knowing i could up and leave at any moment brings some sort of comfort, i suppose? there are voices in the house - people i haven’t meant yet, boyfriends, friends, neighbours, dogs. they aren’t ghosts, they are very alive, living a life which is on preview. it’s such a large house, three floors, i haven’t seen the third floor yet, or the basement, and i hear these voices waft through the high ceilings. i’m re-programming my brain - i like connection, these people are nice, everything is okay, everything is okay. everything is great, actually.

20 march

i don’t tell my elevator pitch as much anymore because i know these people now and the people who might come into my radius don’t care to talk about trivial things like work or nationality. that’s a relief. i am living in this house no longer as a preview but as a default. i love it. brussels has a magical quality about it. when im walking in the streets i feel this sense of possibility and inspiration which i rarely have when im cycling in amsterdam. why is that? perhaps because im usually headed to my 9-5. or because here, im sitting with a sample size of humanity in the small tram car. the tram has brown leather seats and smells like smoke and city and is filled with beautiful belgian faces. people are speaking french and reading and standing and together. you don’t really get that feeling of togetherness on a bike.

everyone here seems to be an artist or a lesbian or both - filmmakers, festival producers, designers, pop musicians, actors, djs. people really live here, they rarely shower or brush their hair, they wear big jeans and colourful tops and have rings in their lips and nostrils. they sit on terraces and drink tea and make out, rubbing their unruly facial hair together and merging their odors and sharing plans and ideas. i’ve never felt such little pressure to appease a male gaze, to dress in a certain way. i’ve worn the same pair of baggy jeans with different iterations of skirts, t shirts, and dresses thrown on top. it is spacious here. spacious in my skin, spacious in the walls, spacious in the hilly landscape, spacious in the way people converse. i feel relaxed. i feel grateful.

25 march

rollies

lapsang souchong

mullets

fringes

stinging nettle

femicide

piss

pils

candelabra

compost

garden

sweat

drafty

spider

25 march

four days ago I saw the most lush spider hanging out in the corner of my massive wall. it was thick and fleshy, black and furry. i was just coming back from carnival sauvage, a day of debauchery. i saw a man dressed in a suit made from real human hair. kind of like a spider.

when i arrived back (alone) i saw spider (together). i sent a picture to my mom and she said that grandma never killed spiders. don’t kill the spider. don’t kill the spider.

i haven’t stopped thinking about it. sometimes i feel anxious and envision it in my bed. sometimes i feel protected and envision it from above. last night i dreamt about this spider and woke up smiling.

28 march

woosh.

i spent the morning in an argument with my mobile phone provider. they thought i was trying to steal my own identity when I failed the verification test by incorrectly providing the address of my very first apartment in amsterdam, my place of residence when I bought the SIM card (about five subleases, three countries, and one permanent contract ago).

“You’re not listening to me”, the man exclaimed to me on the phone.

I hung up and tried again. I was listening.

I got a new voice. She told me that I needed to hang up and ask the AI chat bot on their website. Okay. I hung up. I went on to do as told (I’m a very good listener) and after feeding the AI several pieces of input about what was wrong with my phone, at the very end of our conversation it replied to me “our AI chat assistant is not currently in operation. Please try again on Monday). Okay.

So I spent the afternoon wandering Rue Haute, more or less directionless. I brought my work phone along so that I could hot-spot myself in a pinch. After drifting from thrift store to thrift store and buying some overpriced corduroys, I looked up movie theaters. Wouldn’t it feel nice to dissolve into a cinema. It was 18:15 and I had to act fast. Most cinemas in my vicinity would only have showtimes at 18:30 and 21:00.

I ran to one ten minutes away. The cinema’s website indicated that the movie showing at 18:30 would have english subtitles. When I got there, the non-binary person at the counter told me it would not have english subtitles.

I was horribly aimless today. Borderline lonely. Heck, I was lonely. No spider, no entourage, no phone, no nothin. Just myself and some over priced pants. I’m excited to get back home, sleep in my bed, see my friends faces, ride my bike. Thoughts about moving here have been whirling around my head, but I find it difficult to imagine packing up the life I’ve built and moving to a foreign country again. I would have to take some hostages with me. From this thought spawns more stressful thoughts about staying in Amsterdam long-term, but that’s for another substack.

Maybe its time to pack up this weird and fun little chapter. Thanks Brussels, you’re a freak.