On a train between the Netherlands and Germany, I think about the lenses emotions give us, the many selves we’ve been, and the mother I have and all the mothers she could have been. Over coffee, in this lifetime, earlier today, we choose each other again.

On the train that carries all the feelings forward

I’m on a train from the Netherlands to Germany, fizzing with an odd blend of energies. Maybe it’s the song, “Listen to the Water” by Legendary Skies that’s playing in my headphones that turns my emotional volume up. Melancholy, love, gratefulness: they flood every cell as I’m writing this.
When I let myself feel what’s actually here to be felt, my eyes get teary. There is so much to feel in this world. You can sense it by touch, skin to world, but also through the lens you’re looking through. Emotions are portals. Change the lens you’re looking through, and the lens changes the way you see your world. Like editing a photo on your iPhone: one tap and the image brightens, saturates, or flattens to grey. Same scene, different lens.

(And yes, you can let the body feel the wave without letting your mind bind to it; simply feel the emotions move throughout your body with awareness.)

Stones, houses, people

Out the left window, the fields open and houses appear. What catches me are the stones, the ones these small German country homes are made of, as my train barrels past at 200 km/h. I know these stones. Where I grew up, the houses are built with the very same kind. And still, even with the same materials, people live differently here. The shift is subtle. You can feel it.

The thousand versions of us

We’re all human, flesh, bone, awareness, soul. The cranky neighbor, the cat lady down the street, the ex–high school bully. Same matter. But where and when our soul chose to root matters, too. There are a thousand versions of you and a thousand of me, already latent in the map of time and place. Who would I be if I had grown up oceans away? Who would my mother be if one choice had tipped the axis and unconsciously triggered the butterfly effect?

Coffee with my mother

Maybe it’s the train’s speed that pulls me backward and forward at once. Earlier today my mom, who’s fighting cancer, and I had a rare ordinary moment. We sat and shared a coffee. That used to be routine, until a few months ago when everything shifted.
Since then, time has felt elastic. Days become hours, weeks become days, months shrink to weeks. Sometimes an hour stretches into a year. I’m learning that the human experience is built on perception, on the lenses we inherit and the ones we choose.
I took a sip and fell through a small door in memory: all the places in the world where I’ve shared coffee, with strangers, with beloveds. I’ve sat in the same physical spot as wildly different versions of myself, each one stitched from small pieces of other people I’ve loved or simply observed. Versions within versions. Selves within time. I have a favorite coffee shop in the city I used to live before mom got sick; it makes me feel odd when I realise how many versions of me exactly have stepped through that door and ordered a coffee.

The castle of choices

Sometimes I visualize life as a place of walls and windows where the rooms are choices. In some of them my mother made different ones. I walk those corridors and visit the lives she might have lived. And then I come back to this room, this life, where she is my mother, and we are here, coffee between us, time both short and long, I’m in awe. She’s honestly the best mom ever, not because we’ve always been best friends, but because she is real, honest and open. She respects me, we’ve put in the work over the years and have built a thousand bridges between us, so we can meet at the same spot and understand one another. We’re now best friends, too. And the thought of losing her, living without her by my side, makes me almost panic. But then I remember she chose me, and I chose her. I don’t want her to go. I find that hard to accept; I often feel frightened when I realize that I’m scared to lose her. What if she made different choices and the butterfly effect did the rest?

What follows is my love letter to all of her possible lives, and to the one that brought me here.

In another life my mother is not a mother.
She does not meet my father.
She takes the train to The Hague,
studies language and culture,
falls so in love with words
that words return her to herself.

Light finds all the pieces of her,
She looks clearly, yet cannot quite see
her own brightness without blinking.
She cannot yet fathom how iridescent she is,
only that the room softens when she enters.

Her shadow learns to dance with her light.
Passion begins to glow.
She moves to the rhythm of the steps she took,
tangos a little, misses a little, laughs anyway.

Year after year the Australian sun
answers her laughter with its own.
Life does not chase her down
or load her with borrowed weight.
Her arms are full of her own fullness.
She does not have to hold anything
to be whole, except the light she keeps.

On a terrace in Sydney she drinks coffee,
water glistening beyond the rail.
Steam from her cup rises and disappears into air,
the most ordinary kind of miracle.
Another version of her sits at the same table,
years later, or earlier; time refuses to obey.
Perhaps I am there too, not knowing her.

Perhaps we pass, incidental strangers,
carrying the same eyes, the same hands,
the same tendency to linger in silence
until silence speaks.

In this current life my mother is a mother.
She sits across from me, ill but here,
lifting the cup we have lifted everywhere
with so many versions of ourselves.
With and without one another.

Steam from my cup rises and disappears into air,
the most magical alchemy is happening here.
She trusts life, her own heart,
and me, the daughter across the table
with the same love for language and story.
I am the hand that lifts what she laid down.
I keep moving the thread she began.

Where the current is taking me

I’m in that strange stretch of life where the river pulls me deep into my past while my future reaches for my hand. I’m building a new business. I’m caring for my mother. I’m learning to integrate the truest insight of this season: perception is everything, and everything I’ve ever built has led me to become my mother’s daughter. Each day I recognise more of her in me. It gives me courage. She is the strongest person I know.

P.S. My mom and I are making a Dutch podcast that takes you with us through her cancer journey. It launches in the coming weeks. I’ll keep you posted.