For months, something had been humming underneath my life.
Very low. Very committed.
I could be having a genuinely good day and it would still be there, doing its little shift in the basement. Coffee, work, running, dates, dinners, Amsterdam, dancing until some unreasonable hour. Fine. Great, even.
Still humming.
I never quite decided what it was.
Love feels too generous. Grief feels too elegant. Anger had better things to do. Humiliation definitely contributed.
Whatever.
It had excellent attendance.
Eventually I got used to having it around. It came to work with me, sat through dinners, joined dates it hadn’t been invited to, ran kilometres it certainly hadn’t trained for and occasionally turned up in the middle of a very good night, just to prove that having fun and being haunted are perfectly compatible activities.
Sometimes it would disappear for a few hours and I would notice, carefully.
Oh.
Then a song would come on, a car would look vaguely familiar, somebody would mention a place, or Monday would have the audacity to happen again.
There it was.
Last week I went away.
It was the kind of place that already belonged to another summer, which felt slightly unfair. Places should really come with better storage. You give them one version of your life and apparently they keep the whole thing.
I knew this before I went. I knew there would be airports and the sea and certain kinds of light, all those completely innocent things that become accomplices once memory gets involved. The body is particularly stupid about this. It recognises things before you have had the chance to give it instructions.
So I expected the volume to go up.
The first day, it did.
The present was there, perfectly functional, while another summer kept bleeding through at the edges. My eyes filled up once or twice. Nothing catastrophic. I behaved with dignity, by which I mean nobody had to escort me anywhere.
The sea looked fantastic.
Annoying.
Then there was music.
And people.
And the great inconvenience of life continuing to be interesting.
People who knew absolutely nothing about me. Dancing. Sweat. Stupid jokes becoming extremely important at four in the morning. Somebody I enjoyed looking at. Losing my friends. Finding my friends. Losing them again. A conversation I remember almost nothing about except laughing until my stomach hurt. Mornings arriving before anybody had authorised them.
The usual important things.
At some point, I stopped checking which summer I was in.
There was no moment.
No meaningful stare at the horizon. No cinematic revelation. Nobody handed me a metaphor.
I was just there.
Same place. Different things happening in it.
I like this about places. They don’t seem particularly loyal.
You can turn up carrying an enormous story about what happened there and the place really doesn’t care. Somebody spills a drink on your shoe. You lose your sunglasses. A song you didn’t know last week becomes the song.
And that’s that.
Then I came home.
Eindhoven. Empty apartment. Post-festival serotonin economy. Laundry everywhere. Three days alone.
Historically, a strong environment for bullshit.
Some part of me must have expected the usual descent. The silence after too much music. The empty bed. Too much time. All the familiar doors standing conveniently open.
So I waited.
Not deliberately.
I wasn’t sitting on the sofa going, come on then, devastate me.
I made coffee. Slept. Woke up. Left half my suitcase on the floor because personal growth has limits. Went out. Came back. Spent an evening alone and then another.
Nothing happened.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what was strange about that.
Then I heard it.
Or rather, I didn’t.
The fucking hum.
Gone.
I don’t know when it stopped.
After months of hearing it everywhere, I feel slightly cheated by this. I knew the thing embarrassingly well. I could hear it under music, conversation, sleep, even happiness. You’d think after all that it could at least have the decency to make an exit.
Apparently not.
It had just stopped showing up.
I went back to a place that already belonged to another summer and came home carrying another one.
Same sea. Different noise.
The old summer is still there. Same light. Same corners. All of it.
It just has neighbours now.
And somewhere during the week, while everybody was being very loud,
I stopped hearing it.