I found myself last spring, walking the streets of Maastricht past crumbling city walls and churches-turned-nightclubs, on cobblestone, menacing crags to my thin boot heels not made for touring old world cities. I carefully took each step from fear that my heel might snap, might wedge itself between two sharp stones.
And yet how I delighted in feeling like that boot-heel split, separated from the duty of wife and mother, wandering unfamiliar streets, without knowing where I’ll sleep that night.
How I tingled and shivered with his hand’s warm touch on the small of my back, directing me through the streets of his youth, to The Take Five, to Heaven, where small Brandt beer glasses cheer, “Proost!” and skunky-sweet red-haired buds await us in a smoky haze, through the caverns below Mount St. Pieter, dank and unnatural limestone that sheltered persecuted lives, in the second world war. They now shelter the self I found there.
Not a year gone by and I’m charting my return to the city on the Maas, hoping to get lost again like my boot heel in the low mortar between the cobbled stones, the cavernous maze hiding beneath, in the shudder and tingle of a lover’s touch, in the identity I must lose to find myself again.