I left my hometown when I was 19. After nearly two decades in a dozen Dutch cities, Sydney and Shanghai, I’m back. I push Hasse’s stroller and see once again these streets and buildings that are old yet ever new. Everything is closer than I remember it, distances I travelled as a teenager seem now so trivial.
Recently, I went karting and I wasn’t the fastest. I went to play badminton with friends, and I was beaten. And for the first time, I was fine with it. We went to IKEA, and now I shopped for our family. Nearly every day I cook, and I take great joy from it, to the extent I can relate to those super cliché television commercials of happy families.
As a teenager, I listened to music with my friends, and we got our identity from the bands we badged our backpacks with, or the new songs we discovered. We borrowed part of our identity from the posters in our bedrooms, pulled ourselves up by the greatness of artists and athletes.
Now I open my Facebook and it’s nostalgia galore. Old yet unopened Lego sets are sold, games and movies are remade. I listen to Linkin Park and 3 Doors Down, whose singers are no longer among us. Avril Lavigne is 42, which sounds unbelievable — as in my mind she’s still that skater girl.
We live near my parents, one of the reasons to come back to the Netherlands. Somewhere in these decades you find out they’re normal people as well, who made decisions you’re facing now, made them with the best of intentions, and did the best they could within their limitations. It’s only now you understand the effort they put into raising you.
When I was younger, I saw life as all-or-nothing, and somewhere deep down we believe the lie that it will all go on forever. Now I see it as a slow process. Time will slowly consume us, the way it took the singers on my old posters.
To make up for it, though, the world keeps sending new things our way, and it’s our job to watch, to listen carefully, and then to act on it. It’s alright if we don’t get to the finish line first. I went through a hundred cities to be back here, with a Dutch-Chinese family, a laptop full of photos and notes.
I push the stroller through these renewed streets. I have told Hasse many lies, about gnomes that live in the forest, about ducks that gossip on the riverbank, about mice that drive cars. And I tell her I’ll always be by her side.
