Across the ocean, there is a street made of language.
 

Located four metro stops from the heart of Amsterdam, Wibautstraat (“Wibaut Street”) was once home to the Netherlands’ most prominent newspapers. The eccentric Volkshotel was originally the headquarters of de Volkskrant, a left-leaning daily newspaper often covered in bright graphics. The Het Parool Theater was once the offices of the paper of the same name, which originated from Dutch resistance efforts against Nazi occupation during World War II. The now-shuttered Trouw nightclub was the popular tabloid Trouw, a fellow former resistance-era paper. The Wibautstraat metro station has multicolored serif letters jumbled across its walls, commemorating the language that once lived there. On the station’s platform, a small plaque explains the street’s history through the five main stages of newspaper production: letters, headlines, photos, printing, and newspaper pages.
 

My decision to study abroad in Amsterdam was almost completely random. I had only traveled a handful of times with my family and knew next to nothing about every possible location I could have chosen. I wasn’t even sure I had any real interest in this voluntary disorientation, but my friends were selecting their new European college towns and I haphazardly opted in. Seemingly by chance, I ended up in a city I fell more madly in love with than any place or person I’d ever known.
 

When we arrived from Schiphol airport for the very first time, the wide path of Wibautstraat immediately welcomed us in. Our dorm, called “The Social Hub,” was more of a Willy Wonka style hotel. The lobby’s cafe pumped out fresh croissants and espresso martinis all day long as my new friends and I sat in its neon orange booths and told each other the stories that narrated our lives. To my complete shock and delight, moving to Amsterdam was the easiest life transition I had to date. In spite of our bizarre hotel-adjacent living situation and utter unfamiliarity with anything Dutch, Amsterdam quickly felt like our newer, brighter home. 
 

As a journalism student, living on Wibautstraat was the manifestation of all my writerly dreams come to life. In this completely new place, I was immediately embraced by the medium that predominated my college experience. Coming into college with almost no journalism background, my time at Michigan had steeped itself in developing the skills and critical thinking style necessary for the kind of writing that established history as it’s being made. In literature classes chronicling the form and editorial meetings spent debating minute dictatorial choices, I was amazed by the power of words to identify the silent honesty shaping everyday humanity. Now stepping away from the stained glass windows of The Michigan Daily and shadowy basement of Mason Hall, I was greeted by a backstory that surpassed my wildest imaginings. Every time I studied in the Volkshotel workspace or jogged past the former Trouw building, I cherished the invisible string tying me to the objective truths that lived exactly where I did. 
 

On one of my first days of independently exploring the city, I hopped off the metro at Nieuwmarkt—a stop best known for its proximity to Amsterdam’s infamous Red Light District. Among a slew of storefronts advertising sex worker services and pre rolled joints, I found Het Fort van Sjakoo, a nonprofit bookstore focused on radical and anarchist literature. I had been told Amsterdam was known for its counterculture, one that invited in every alternative to the rigid structures driving the rest of the outside world to madness. The smells and lights of its surroundings radiated into the bookstore, a joint agreement to pursue a society that allowed not just for the enjoyment of recreational tolerance, but for a wholly open collective mind. Rather than contradict with its purportedly depraved surroundings, the language of Het Fort van Sjakoo was in conversation with the textured pleasures of the city’s free spirited philosophies. 
As I perused the stacks of bell hooks essay collections and Marxist manifestos, I began to realize that, despite my quick infatuation with Amsterdam, I was still searching for the sense of rootedness I felt in good old fashioned Ann Arbor. While I lived on a street embedded in writing, I quickly found myself lacking the proper words to capture the sublime magnitude of my new surroundings. I was looking for an avenue to make sense of experiences I was not yet ready to describe, a stand in for the complex language underneath. I peered around the corner to find a rack of postcards decorated in inspiring words from some of the recent world’s most monumental thinkers. I picked up every one that spoke to me and left the store with six cards and a beaming smile across my face. As I walked out, I told the store owner how much I loved the place, even though I hadn’t actually bought any of the main products they sold. He politely laughed and thanked me and I enthusiastically promised I would be back soon. 
   

My favorite card of the bunch featured four messily drawn, smiling stick figures holding hands against the backdrop of graffiti that read: “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.” Behind the stick figures an angry orange blob accompanied by the phrase “dans quel monde?” (“in what world?”) and an illuminati-esque triangle logo tries (and fails) to paint over the graffiti. It’s confusing and strange and I became quickly enamored with dissecting it. I googled the quote to discover its attribution to Emma Goldman, a prominent 20th century anarchist and feminist (and fellow Jew!). I pondered the placement of each of the six cards on my wall and opted to pushpin this one directly above where I lay my head, inviting its wisdom to guide me through my waking and waning moments each day. I began exploring Amsterdam under the guiding principle of prioritizing revolutions I could dance to and found they were everywhere I turned. As my newfound friends and I traversed the canal lined streets through sunny days and immortal nights, a sense of freedom and exhilaration underscored every colorful adventure. 
   

I progressively began collecting postcards anywhere I could find them. Every bar we began to frequent, every boutique we stopped into on the way to class, and every museum gift shop I sprinted into minutes before they closed gained an added layer of choice and meaning. As I walked through the harrowed halls of the monumentally large Rijksmuseum, I eagerly anticipated the search for my favorite paintings’ replicated and commodified younger siblings. And when the pieces I liked best were not included in the thorough array of the gift shop’s options, my preferences speedily shifted to align with whatever was provided. Every experience was codified by the images available for selection in representing it. I began shaping all my choices around the image, stopping into stores to grab cards more often than groceries. I looked forward to the synthesis of my travels as much as the actual items on our itinerary. When I realized I had left Madrid without getting a postcard, I felt as if I had left a primary aim of the trip unfulfilled. I didn’t trust myself to remember the sheer joy of that journey if I didn’t have something to remind me of it every time I walked into my room. 
What began as a habit became a ritual embedded in my experience abroad. By the end of the semester, I had to climb onto chairs to reach the few spaces on my wall left blank. What began as six small cards to spruce up an otherwise barren room slowly piled up into almost two hundred items in a museum-like collection of the spaces I inhabited over those four months. I had been unbelievably lucky enough to see such an excess of unique, unimagined beauty in 16 cities across 10 countries, with Amsterdam as my reliably perfect home base. My walls were the ultimate commemoration of the profound happiness that radiated through my every day, the images that aimed to encapsulate the histories of language running beneath every sight. 
 

The moment I arrived home in New York, I compiled the cards into an overstuffed notebook and labeled them with their places of origin. I feared the rapid, inevitable erosion of my ability to remember where and when, and why. I translated every word on every card into the frantic, halfhearted broken English produced by translation apps. I then marked every place I could remember ever being in every country I visited through digital landmarks on Google Maps, then again on Apple Maps, just because. I organized every picture I had posted on Instagram to make for easy re-chronicling when I wanted to remember how it felt to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. 
I sat cross-legged as I picked through the postcards one by one, admiring their vibrancy from my childhood bedroom floor. As the notebook filled up and the pile left to look through shrunk, I was left with the unfounded emptiness of a life phase concluded. When I revisited the Emma Goldman card, a new pit rose in my stomach, a shadow of the elation I had once felt in its essence. I decided to read more into who Emma Goldman was, a last ditch effort to recreate a euphoria I was scared I would never rediscover at home. As it turned out, Emma Goldman had never actually said the quote attributed to her. It was a mere paraphrasing of her autobiography used to sell t-shirts in the 1970s, likely to people like me who were attracted to the idea of revolutions that aligned with, rather than disrupted, our dancing. 
I began to fear our revolutions and dancing might be entirely separate, leaving me in the limbo of seeking reiterations of the joy I felt abroad without trusting it actually existed. I had been forced to confront that the principle I rooted my life to in Amsterdam was a farce. The language I tethered myself to withered, leaving me to pick up the pieces thousands of miles away. For the first time in months, the language within the storied past of Wibautstraat and its discontents was entirely out of reach.
   

My postcard collection—or obsession, depending on who you ask—was a commitment to finding some route towards sense-making within events seemingly too large for my own language capabilities. I was the happiest I had, at that time, ever been in my life, and yet I struggled to place it into the succinct sentences I had become proficient in as a journalist. Every week I looked up at the sky from a new country or city and knew it was one of the cornerstone moments of my life. Where I lost ground was understanding what exactly these experiences meant and where they fit into my life beyond the semester’s end. And so I collected image after image, allowing them to overlay until eventually language became the afterthought, not the objective. In his novel Mao II, Don DeLillo wrote “In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.” I had allowed myself the simple joy of easy codification, running on the image until suddenly I was home again and given the task of ascribing meaning to my collection. 
 

I realized my brain thought in image, envisioning the pictures I would take that would represent events I was looking forward to or the colorful renderings that would pepper my walls after a trip. As I ran through nearby Frankendael Park or enjoyed stale pastries at Hartog’s Bakery, I relished in the image of the smiling, carefree vision of me I believed I had finally gotten acquainted with abroad. I thought of why we planned the trips we did, how we so seamlessly acted with photos and souvenirs at the hidden crux of our choices. I ran through the highlight reel of museums I mostly skimmed through and street corner history plaques I took pictures of but forgot to translate into English. I shamefully pondered what I might have diluted by focusing so much on the image I had neglected to do the much harder work of uncovering the language that informed their existence. I felt I had let Wibautstraat’s perfect history down by accidentally abandoning the literary roots at the core of my self-perceptions.  I saw whole paintings in small pictures and all I wanted was more of the same. 
I resented and feared the fact that I was so desperate not to forget anything that I possibly hadn’t experienced anything at all. I worried I had let language go in service of the image, creating a reality that in its truest form had nothing much to say. When asked about the key to his work, Mao’s fictionalized version of artist Andy Warhol says: “The secret to me is that I’m only half here.” He muses on the value of his notorious pop art style, images of infamous celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and dictators like Mao Zedong overlaid with shiny neons—the public figures at the center of a consumerist culture reprinted into colorful emptiness. Warhol acknowledges his own existence in the image, the pressurized perceptive shell dictating who he is as an artist and what his work gets to mean. I wondered if I, too, had rendered these grand places and personal transformations into mere reproductions of image, over and over again like Warhol’s Campbell's soup cans. I faced the possibility that, like Warhol, I had become just as much image as I was human.

 

When I returned to Ann Arbor in the fall, one of my first nights was spent at The Michigan Daily for our semesterly introduction meeting. As I peered around at the new faces that had joined while I was abroad, what had once felt homey and safe had reverted to total, uncomfortable novelty. I abruptly quit the paper, severing me from the vantage point I had once used to see the campus and city around me. I revisited once frequented streets and cafes I hadn’t seen for almost a year, forcing me to rediscover Ann Arbor through the lens of all the ways I believed I had changed since leaving for Amsterdam. 
 

As I walked down South University Avenue—the main street of the neighborhood I’d lived in for most of my collegiate life—I was disoriented by the looming dread of the beginning of my last year of college. My suddenly clear vision of the conclusion of this pivotal era seemed to appear out of thin air, as if linear time had been simultaneously confirmed and yet flipped on its head. 
 

When I returned to my new apartment on Church Street, I looked at the art I have had hanging in my room since my freshman year. I had originally painted these three purple canvases because I couldn’t find any images online that represented what I wanted to communicate about who I was. The result was a collection of flowers, a Volkswagen Buggy driving through a rainbow, and the Keith Haring-style logo of the Best Buddies club. I looked at this succinct, self-made rendering of my selfhood and yet found myself craving the chaos of my postcard wall in Amsterdam. I ventured out determined to find the Ann Arbor equivalent of the satisfying delight of image collection I had become accustomed to. 
   

Nestled in the Nickels Arcade, Parrish Fine Framing and Art sold mass-printed, miniature hand drawings of campus hotspots like the Diag and the Cube. The same cards were sold down the street at the M Den and across the way at Elmo’s. The cards felt distinctly less exciting than those I had acquired abroad, yet I swelled with pride at my personal, storied familiarity with every place. Rather than imagine the memories other people must have had in exotic locations like Lisbon and Stockholm, I had the privilege of picking cards that conjured up the heartwarming moments at the heart of my college experience. 
 

I hung up the eight cards I purchased next to the canvases I had for years, an attempt to meld the exploratory and grounded pieces of myself I hoped could coexist. Rather than the messy chaos of my walls abroad, these cards lay neatly in a row, a mark of progress in the organization and comprehension of what it meant to be the sort of person who got a genuine kick out of looking for images everywhere they lived. I slowly opened up to the idea that there was merit not just in the language that once lived on Wibautstraat, but in the collection of images that had temporarily lived there, too. I realized there actually was a profound pleasure inherent to the process of image production and allowed myself the liberty of living partially in service of images that induced an automatic, authentic smile. 
 

I got into the habit of gazing outside my apartment window each evening as I listened to my roommates chatter about their days. I basked in the warmth of five girls who love and support each other deeply, the way we talk for hours each night as if we don’t already spend every waking second indirectly intertwined. Our sixth floor view allows us to see unbelievable, vivid sunsets on every clear night, a revolving door for the perfect photo opportunity. I often take out my phone to document the moment, smiling at the knowledge that when I rewatch the photo’s live version, I will be able to hear the peaceful chaos of my apartment’s nightly banter. I welcome that having the ability to document this unparalleled and utterly unique life phase—to be able to hear the language behind me over again—makes it all the more special. I believe in giving ourselves permission to coexist with the image, to find ways to allow it to serve and inspire us as we pursue the larger truths of the words around us. I let go of the bitter, unsustainable fight against my unsophisticated instincts and instead tried telling them yes, there is a place here for you too. 

    

One of my last days in Amsterdam, my closest friends and I went to the Spui thrift and book market—a weekly event we had never had the time to actually explore until the end of the semester. Basking in the piles of 1970’s lifestyle magazines and lovingly pre owned copies of classic novels, we stood at the street’s entryway and took in the friendly image of language on collective display. 
 

As we sorted through the seemingly infinite assortment of everything from annotated flower prints to nearly century old postcards sent from lovers and friends and family, we lived in the stories behind everything we touched. Every image we fell in love with held its language within it, a dual invitation into both its external and internal stories—a roundabout journey through the past and back into this glorious present. After joyfully sorting through boxes of postcards sent from New York to Amsterdam, I found one from Washington Square Park, where my parents got engaged nearly 25 years ago. The handwritten back of the card, dated to Eindhoven in the Netherlands in April 1974, read (after being messily Google translated) :

“Hi!
Here’s a message from the hotel in the always busy city. It’s very silly here. Our furniture arrives on Thursday. Glen Rock is a very nice village. Our house is also very nice and we have some acquaintances. Next week we go to school and that is the lobby of our campus. When are you leaving, Laurence? How are the driving lessons doing, Kees? 
Bye bye,
Karen.” 

The card’s warm everydayness stood as a testament to the moments where language and image converge—painting a whole, deeply human picture of finding roots in new places. It was the same feeling that radiated through me while a Dutch tattoo artist I had just met permanently inked puzzle pieces into my left ankle as I listened to a recording of my dad’s newest album. It was the swelling in my heart as I watched a woman paint a bridge in the corner of crowded Vondelpark, the utter awe of watching someone render an image somehow more delightful than the scene itself. 
A few weeks after my newfound permittance of image delight, I sat on my bed looking down at a new love—who I had, funnily enough, met in Amsterdam and reconnected with in Ann Arbor—as he lay next to my copy of Notes On An Execution by Danya Kukafa. I originally bought the book for its cover’s pretty lavender hue, later realizing the gruesome tales of a serial killer were not in my usual wheelhouse of romance and coming of age novels. I had drunkenly read the first few pages, waiting for the night to reignite with the all-encompassing warmth of budding intimacy. Though I didn’t have the chance to actually take a picture, the image of him looking at the book stuck, as if my brain had confirmed to me that everything I wanted to believe in had completely come true. 
 

In that moment what mattered to me was not the actual content of the book, but the feeling of its coexistence with the person who showed me I was capable of loving more than just cities. It was enough for the possibility of language to be there, working in tandem with the image of a life I proudly and delicately held in my hands each day. I gazed up at my wall, noticing the intricate details within the drawings of beautiful academic buildings I have spent countless hours in. I felt the loving embrace of paintings that have watched over me as my heart contracted between gleeful soaring and hopeful aching throughout these illustrious four years. 
 

I savored the way language and image worked together to capture this moment, one I would carry with me to all the new cities that may come next and all the postcards I can only hope to collect. I imagined traversing Wibautstraat once again, peering around at the establishments lovingly honoring the effervescence of the eternal story. And I understood there was a world—one I had helped create—in which I could wake up every morning, in Amsterdam and Ann Arbor and everywhere in between, and allow the images I love to be the very first thing I see.