Loosely based on Chantal Akerman’s 1977 gorgeous epistolary filmic essay News from Home, Elfie Tromp pens an ode to our hometown. Wandering the city streets of Rotterdam while sexting her lover, intimate passages of the past bump into unexpected rendezvous.
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SEXT
C: Have you seen the Ferris wheel?
E: Yes
C: I need to sip champagne from your mouth while we ride it.
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2
‘I’m going to spoil this whole town for you. I’ll make sure you have memories of us on every street corner, so you’ll never be able to leave me. If you do leave, you’ll have to move. There will be no restaurant you can go to on a date after us, no bar you can chat someone up. I’m going to take you everywhere and make the memories so good, they will haunt you. This love will stain everything it touches; this is a promise as much as it is threat
3
I didn’t respond. I only thought: I’d like to see you try.
4
I am always biking somewhere, struggling onwards through violent wind gushes that squeeze through the modernist high rise, tugging at scarves, shirts and skirts. With a forever half-flat tire, no one ever taught me how to fix. Never had the time to do it, really. I always had to be somewhere else or adventure couldn’t start. I wasn’t restless: it was a calling. My bike was a plough, cleaving possibility to a fertile future with every turn of the wheel.
5
I always arrived flustered, with wild hair and a sweaty back.
6
Is this city sensual? No, it’s smelly and our kink is poverty. We hit all the bad lists: dirt poor, illiterate, fat, underage pregnancies, drug-related violence. But that never stopped people from lusting. You can have terrific sex on a dirty mattress.
7
Nowadays apartments go for half a million or more in the bad neighbourhoods. It’s the classic story of a city being swallowed up by foreign money, neoliberal greed hiding itself behind a can-do mentality. It’s hyperactive, agitated. The energy pulses through the streets like the blasts of an overactive vibrator. It gets you wild, it gets you off, but it’s not real sex, not real intimacy.
8
Poverty is not solved, it’s shooed off, further and further down the districts, moved to where you can’t see it anymore.
9
The absence of things makes them very present.
10
We’re shaped equally by what surrounds us and by what’s missing.
11
Fact: we have a fragmented heart. That’s as much of a metaphor as it is a reminiscence of our history.
12
Fact: Rotterdammers are travellers and teeth gritters.
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SEXT
E: Baby say something I’m dying without your love or well I’m bored
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13
There’s a person with that tender tinge of boyhood. Germaine Greer would say he’s a visual pleasure and he’s emotional too. He composes modern communication into sexual haikus. He turns the alphabet into foreplay.
14
I used to be a nightclub dancer. A pedestal girl at the NOW&WOW, dipped in drag. Now I only deck myself out in theatre shows and ask entry fees. I’ve learned to capitalise myself like the city did.
The club I used to work at was located in a former grain factory on the south bank of the river. The entrance was a giant reproduction of The Origin of the World by Courbet.
A luscious black-haired bush and two halfway parted meaty thighs as an invitation; it was Rotterdam at its finest. Raving in the womb of history.
The first time I passed through it, a fat naked man was biking through the still empty silo. To be exact: he wore a shower cap and thick rimmed glasses. I thought I’d finally arrived in my future.
That fat naked man was Hans. He has MS now. We performed together last year and I had to help him pull up his fishnet stockings. He messaged me afterwards, detailing sexual dreams. I didn’t respond. Later he apologised. He claimed he had developed a porn addiction because of his medication.
I haven’t heard from him in a long time. Is he dead? I’m looking up his profile right now.
15
He posted the end scene of Nick Cave’s 20,000 Days on Earth five hours ago. Nobody liked it. I feel sad for Hans and respond: ‘Such a great scene <3.’
Nick Cave muses: ‘Our days are numbered and we can’t afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all, because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it.’
I think of all the ideas I had. All the bad ideas I went ahead with. All the plans I didn’t follow through. Did I really spend all those hours dancing?
16
The club owner made all the performers grow their leg and armpit hair. I fell in love with the smell of my own sweat on that stage.
‘There are truths that lie beneath the surface of the words. Truths that rise up without warning like the humps of a sea monster and then disappear.’
Hans likes my comment.
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SEXT
E: I want to stroke your ear and kiss that little dent on the ridge
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17
My devotion to this place used to be spiritual. I spoke in tongues the whispers of midnight debauchery. Now I leave parties before they start. I love my bed more than the dance floor.
18
DJ Nicolas Jaar once said that everyone at a club has a broken heart.
19
I’m tired all the time. It feels like I don’t get anything done. Of course, I still exist, even when exhausted. But maybe the existing is the problem, not the exhaustion.
20
Every city needs peacocks. Colourful birds that brim with beauty, that seem too fragile to be alive. It’s not street lights, big commercials or neon lights that make you turn your head. It’s people. We want to be mesmerised by each other.
The city has turned from a promise to a backdrop. I used to believe what I needed would lie just further up on the road and all I needed to do was head on, make haste.
There are not enough peacocks in the streets.
21
I feel so old these days (which is a metaphor for depression).
Rotterdam has become a place I live reasonably comfortable and occasionally feel stuck in. I suppose that’s what freedom is.
I still ride a rusty bike.
22
My American friend Jason says Rotterdam looks like the future he was promised in 90s America. An actual appreciation for diverse foods, music, art and eclecticism. Seeing this place through a stranger’s eyes makes me like it more.
23
To be able to see myself through someone else’s eyes, is what makes love so alluring. I like what I see of me through the other.
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SEXT
C: Shoulders like a Bernini statue
Curling my fingers in your armpit
Rubbing my nose against your neck
Your skin is the colour of perfect pale marble
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24
I text him because he is persistent. I text him because he is intricate.
I text him because I am bored. I text him because I am needy.
I text him because I want to reach out, expand.
I text him because why not? I text him like a city growing.
I text him as a board member, I text him as an architect, I text him as a mayor, I text him as a girl in love. I text him as a future.
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SEXT
E: I’m going to this thing. Want to join?
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25
He’s coming.
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SEXT
C: Horoscope: my tongue in your mouth
Horoscope: saliva and love
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26
A blush spreads over his cheeks like a spree of birds before sunset when he sees me again. I forgot how quiet he really is, like he’s saving up his voice. I’m thinking of his saliva pooling behind those straight teeth.
27
We go to a restaurant I couldn’t afford at his age. He loves the lavish. Tiny bites and tasteful lighting. There’s more and more of these places around these days. I used to drink beer from crumpled plastic cups and thought it was absolute freedom. He critiques the quality of the wine glasses. Somehow, that’s hot.
28
I take him to Bazar the next day for the big Mediterranean breakfast platter. In between the bustling of hotel visitors, lit out in all shades of coloured light, we make room for the big golden tray carrying plushy white bread, greasy, baked slices of garlic sausage, boiled eggs, fruits and yeasty pancakes with yoghurt. We feed each other. There are so many things shifting, growing, boiling. The day blooms, the city buzzes. He puts his head on my lap and I feel something cracking, something old and hard within me, like old pavement in a heatwave. I tap the egg on the table, let the slippery white slide in his mouth.
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SEXT
E: Want to show you all the beautiful things
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