Is Relaxed a Place or a Feeling?
By Christa Orth
When I made my home Amsterdam, a stillness took over the core of me. Now, when I feel a vibration, any vibration at all, I awaken from this calmness and find myself talking to a neighbor about trees, tasting an almond pastry, cry/laughing while playing a board game.
This utopia is a state of being.
It’s taken months for my body to calm down. When I lived in New York, my core vibrated intensely, always. Except when I napped at acupuncture, or smoked some weed, or lay in my partner’s arms after coming. I was always on the move, doing, serving, seeking. After a few months in Amsterdam, I thought I felt tired, or was it just actually relaxed?
My joints are smooth in their sockets riding a heavy bike through the evening light. My gait is steady, unbroken, walking along a reflective canal. My breathing is natural, my lungs are two pink balloons gently filling and deflating, fueling this new utopia.
It’s working its way into me.
I try to bring this calmness wherever I go, over borders. For the first couple of days visiting New York City, I’m breathing the steadiness, I’m gentle and light. I’m holding on to it. I’m taking time to notice white and green buds on the trees, the call to Eid prayer, the smiles of people joking in front of the bodega.
At day three, the vibration begins in my stomach, a little knocking into my belly button from the inside. Maybe my heartbeat has sunk a little lower than usual. I swallow some lemon ginger kombucha.
At day four, it’s full-on shaking, shifting my torso from side to side as I rush to the subway to have time to grab coffee and a bagel before my 10:00 meeting. The vibration carries me up the stairs and pulses through my fingers to my keyboard as I try to remember my login.
I try to remember my utopia.
The acrid smell of concrete, pulverized microscopic bits make it up my nostrils. So much dirty concrete road with potholes and used condoms and baby binkies in the gutter. Bare branches with plastic bags crinkling symphony in the breeze. A graffitied monument to a dead white man with a crumpled sleeping bag in the corner for the day. Hopes of building anew scattered here and there behind plywood fences painted forest green, with a hole to peek through. I hope to see trees, but I only see progress.
Sharp metal scaffolding, clang, clang, clangs as it goes up. It’s barely strong enough to not collapse in a freak summer storm. Dug up earth topped with plastic pipes to replace the rusty, bursted ones.
Sewer flowing underground for fourteen miles next to fresh water flowing in over hundreds of miles. After the freak summer storm sewage will overflow into salty bays, overtaking the fish and the frogs and the sea birds.
The utopia is still there, somewhere.
I remember rusty bicycles pulled out of cloudy canals. Trash bins overflowing on Saturday morning after Friday night seagulls sought greasy frites. Mayonnaise smeared on early modern cobblestones. A single, empty bag of Lay’s potato chips on the green grass—did it blow from North America? Or am I just noticing the dirt in Amsterdam?
“Oh, Amsterdam is expensive and dirty,” they say. But I know an expensiver and dirtier place, where tourists are corralled by the Lego and M&Ms stores, and “good” theater costs hundreds of dollars a ticket. How could theater cost so much, until you figure the rent an actor or cello player or stage manager is forced to pay just to lay down their head.
I lay back in soft grass, the fragrance of wisteria gently blowing over.
Utopia is a state of being. Maybe it’s in me.
Christa Orth‘s new chapbook Don’t Stop Me Now: How to Resist Drag Bans and Create Total Gender Liberation is out now from Literary Kitchen.
