Date: 04/06/2025 Location: Bruges, Belgium
The city revealed itself in fragments: the gilded glow of sunrise over Lille’s train tracks, the way Bruges’ canals mirrored the sky — a liquid blue so perfect it felt like a trick. We rode a boat past storybook houses, their stepped gables leaning close as if whispering secrets. The boat tour was overcrowded, the guide’s rehearsed talks dissolving into the hum of engines and clicking cameras. Later, the waffles were cloying, and Google Maps Reviews (one star: “Waited an hour for service!!”) etched our first bruise onto the trip.
Date: 05/06/2025 Location: Bruges, Belgium
In Bruges played on our laptop, Ken’s face pixelated in the dim hotel light. Why would a man like that choose murder for a living?
Outside, marshmallows dissolved on my tongue, sugar gritting between my teeth. At the noodle shop, sunlight came and went like a shy lover, glinting off horse-drawn carriages. Couples strolled by, each holding a leash with a small, well-groomed dog trotting beside them.
The Belfort tower — (much) older than Pisa, Big Ben or Eiffel Tower—creaked under our feet as we climbed its 366 steps. At the top, the wind howled through the carillon’s chimes, and for one stolen hour, the city sprawled beneath us: cobbled streets, canals stitching the rooftops together, windmills’ slow spin. (Older than sin, I thought,) and suddenly we were inside the film — the wind pulling at our hair, the carillon ringing a tune that sounded like time running out.
Rain fell by evening. I wrote postcards in lamplight, ink smudging where droplets hit the paper.
Date: 06/06/2025 Location: Bruges, Belgium
A fairy-tale morning. The sky was the soft blue of a laundered shirt, the clouds like scoops of melting gelato. That’s Toast lived up to its hype—the thick-cut brioche glistened with syrup, pooling like liquid amber on the plate.
The tandem bicycle was a terrible idea. Cobblestones rattled our bones, but we laughed anyway! The handlebars wobbling as we veered past windmills.
A wrong bus north, then another south — ur footsteps mapping a accidental rose on the city’s grid. Typical, I thought. We’d come chasing a movie, but our story was all wrong: no gangsters, no gunfire — just gentleness, and getting lost.
By evening, Ghent’s Gothic spires stood half in light, half in storm, chiaroscuro dramas in real time.
At sunset, we wandered into the longest blue hour I’ve ever known. By nine, the world turned hyacinth—twilight lingering like a held breath. We walked until the streetlamps flickered on, their glow pooling on the canals. Blue hour, you’d called it, but it felt endless. Maybe grief does that too: stretches time until the air aches.
P.S. The boatmen no longer row by hand, and the Belfort costs more than five euros. Ken haunted me. A killer who wept at altarpieces, who hesitated. Maybe he hadn’t chosen the job. Maybe it chose him, the way Bruges chose us: gently, inevitably, leaving us with nothing but a sugar-dusted memory and the unanswerable why.