Page 4 of What Happens in Amsterdam

And then, an equally bizarre thought:I live here.

It sounds so absurd that my heart squeezes in my chest and a pressure starts building behind my eyes. And yet what’s most absurd is that this could be my chance for a reinvention. Here, I don’t have to be the girl whose parents consider too breakable. I don’t have to be the girl who forwarded her ex’s private, borderline-smutty emails to the whole company or the girl whose friends told her she was acting immature when all she wanted was for them to hold her hand and let her cry. The girl everyone is running laps around, mortgages and promotions and holiday cards with kids in matching outfits.

When are you going to figure things out?

Grow up?

Settle down?

And did you remember to refill your meds?

Maybe this is exactly where I’m supposed to be. Maybe it’s a sugar rush or maybe it’s the jet lag, or maybe it’s a giddiness Ihaven’t felt since I was a kid. I’m not sure I’ve ever possessed a true childlike sense of wonder—maybe jaded is in my nature—and yet here, in the middle of this market in a city I once wrapped in love and then in heartbreak, I finally feel it.

Amsterdam is going to change my life.

It has to.

Two

Whoever coined the phrasejust like riding a bikehad clearly never ridden one in Amsterdam. During rush hour. In the pouring rain.

The Netherlands is the tallest country in the world and I am only four-eleven, which I’ve just learned is 150 centimeters and enough to make most bike shop owners recoil, as though outfitting someone this short with a bike is a challenge they never received the right training for.

“This is an omafiets,” said the guy at the third shop I tried, a rental subscription place with a monthly fee. “A granny bicycle.”

Then it was my turn to recoil. Maybe this was a comment on my biking ability or the dark circles under my eyes. Which, fair on both counts. But the guy reassured me that this is simply the style of bike here in the Netherlands. An omafiets has a taller curved frame that lets you sit upright, which is more comfortable and easier to ride longer distances.

In theory, this sounded great. I imagined myself gliding through the city on a charming pastel-pink bike, tulips I’d purchased fromthe flower stand around the corner sticking out of my basket. I’d blend right in with the locals. Quintessential Dutch.

In practice, climbing on the thing feels a little like getting on a roller coaster with a busted track—I can see the way I die, and I’ve surrendered to my fate. The bike I rented isn’t quite the right size, even after the guy lowered the seat as far down as it would go. My toes don’t even skim the ground, and while this might be second nature for people who’ve grown up biking here, for me it feels completely out of control, like I have to trust my body to catch me every time I backpedal to a stop. My body has rarely proven itself trustworthy—not when I lived at the hospital for the first six months of my life, not when an asthma attack kept me from playing the lead in my third grade production of our teacher’s original musicalGeology Rocks!, not when I was so eager for my first kiss that I wound up biting poor Levi Moskowitz’s tongue at Jewish summer camp in middle school.

The next few days are a blur of registration appointments. I get a residence permit, the Netherlands equivalent of a social security number, a bank account. I stumble my way through buying groceries, spending a full hour browsing the narrow aisles of Albert Heijn and translating everything with my phone. I learn that coffeeshops are not, in fact, coffeeshops when I try to order a latte before recognizing that earthy scent and realizing the menu is all joints and edibles with names like Lemon Skunk and Amnesia Haze.

Still, none of it feels real.

By my first day of work, I’ve mostly recovered from jet lag, having mapped the route to my office a few times by bike. I’ve been desperate for human interaction, and phone calls with Phoebe and my parents can only go so far.

“Oh, Dani,” my mother said last night when I made the mistake of mentioning that I was not a natural on a Dutch bicycle. “Don’t push your lungs too hard.”

“You know there’s no judgment if this ends up not working out,” my father put in. “You can come home anytime.”

And then I bit the inside of my cheek and changed the subject.

I try not to take the morning’s steady rain as some kind of omen. Just like Iulia promised, it’s still dark outside at eight thirty, and as a result of spending my whole life in a place without seasons, I don’t have the right clothing for it.

“Water-resistant,” I mutter as I shove at my bike pedals, rain dripping down my lashes and my joke of a jacket clinging to my shoulders, “is a fucking lie.”

I yank the handlebars hard to the right when someone passes me on a bike with what looks like a wheelbarrow attached to the front. Inside are three kids in brightly colored raincoats, and there’s even an infant strapped to the bike’s smaller front seat. This, I gather, is an Amsterdam carpool.

“Sorry!” I yell out when the rider throws me an angry look, wondering if there’s a limit to how many times I can apologize.

When I make it to the parking garage beneath the building that’s just for bikes, I’m drenched and out of breath. I scrape my hair into a stubby ponytail and hit the buzzer for the third floor, squaring my shoulders and trying my best to project confidence.

The office is around the corner from Dam Square, the very center of the city, on a street parallel to international shops and tourist money grabs like Ripley’s Believe It or Not! I’ve been so focused on settling in, I haven’t had a chance to explore it much, but I vow to make some time this weekend. Everything is a clash of old and new: a KFC across from a World War II monument, an H&M next to the royal palace. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it.

CommerX is a startup that claims their new platform will democratize e-commerce like never before, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t fully understand what that means. I’m also not 100 percent sure how to pronounce it.

The problem, I realized when I got to college, was that I had a lot of interests but wasn’t particularly amazing at any of them. I’d always liked art, but I was too pragmatic to believe it could be a real career. The entertainment industry didn’t hold the same allure for me as it did for a lot of my classmates. I liked history, math classes were fine, and there was even the year my parents gave me a fossil kit for Hanukkah and I told everyone I was going to become an archaeologist.

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