My European Summer 🌞💔
a love story
Boom, I’m back—straight from South America, not even glancing at that other America, slingshotting into the Old World, back to the friends, dances, loves, languages, bike lanes, and cobblestone charm I’ve come to hold so dear.
Back to Europe, this magical troubled continent, birthplace of my own magical troubled continent, this transport hub of dreams, this thief of my heart.
But first, the U.K.
Ceri, my orange-haired London dancer-musician friend, captures me on a sofa-bed. We sip steaming mugs of tea and discuss children, whether we want them, how they relate to freedom and commitment and money and expression and desire. Is raising kids what life is all about? We don’t solve that mystery, but I do remember that this is why I’m here, to be near people like Ceri, these rare wonders who jump in and dive deep, who don helmet and headlamp to mine the ore of their doubts and dreams and insecurities for glittering flecks of truth that lie hidden inside.
Now up to the Lake District, to my old friends Alec and Claire, a dynamic duo of glorious weirdness ever since we worked at summer camp 21 years ago, raising their 3- and 7-year-olds with joy and grief and sarcasm and an endless succession of fine foods from the deli they run downstairs. Their kids are charming and sweet and real, and when I play with them in the park and on the couch, I tell myself “I could do this.” Then they cry and vomit and refuse food and demand screens, and I wonder how anyone does this. I’ve just published my own fears about having kids, which Claire and Alec acknowledge as valid, even as they cannot imagine any other life for themselves.1
Then it’s go-go-go to Edinburgh and Valencia, to see more old camp friends, ones I’ve visited many times before, ones who deserve paragraphs but receive only sentences: Alex and her newborn and the Greatest Cadbury Creme Egg, Fred and his fiancee and his trail race. I’ll see them maybe once a year, yet our trust and affection are real, our foundations rock-solid. Friends like these are the glowing waypoints on my emotional map of Europe. The more I see them, the more I want to see them, and the harder it is to settle. This is the trap I’ve sprung for myself, the self-affixed tether that’s kept me whirling and swirling through this world for years. I don’t want to lose my friends.
In the hills above Barcelona I stay with an expat educator friend, talk to her students about gap years, and hop a flight to southern Germany where my bicycle awaits in my ex-girlfriend’s basement. I say hello to the friends I made here during my 5-month early-pandemic sojourn, and I prepare to glide through the rain and sun and snow of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria to the border of Austria.2
But this is not really a story of bike travel, or European exploring, or adventure in the Alps. This is a story of dreams and broken hearts. This is my European summer.
Before it can be broken, a heart must be full. And thanks to the dance community I discovered here in Europe, I’ve enjoyed many an overflowing heart.
In Innsbruck I reunite with Diana, the dance crush I met six months ago in Vienna. We stayed in touch over the winter while I was in Patagonia, and now I’m joining her at a mountain cabin to celebrate a friend’s birthday. We cuddle, grow closer, and make plans to see each other again. Diana will become a friend, fellow traveler, and a co-conspirator—and nothing more. This alone will fill our hearts.3
Boomeranging back into Germany, I cycle north and stay with more dance friends I’ve made in the last year, in Jena and Leipzig. Then I stash my bike with friends in Berlin and hop an Easyjet to Toulouse for my first big dance weekend of 2024.
How to explain these weekends? I’ve tried, but let me try again.4
A fusion dance weekend is the breaking of a dam. Behind this dam is the stored energy of loneliness and desire, the need for touch and smile, the creativity of body not brain, and the childlike playfulness that gasps for air under the crushing demands of “real life.”
Other kinds of partner dance are fun, too—swing and salsa and tango and such—but there’s something special about fusion people. They care about transcending boundaries, minimizing hierarchies, relating authentically, and discovering joy in life’s hidden pockets. They don’t dance to impress, but to connect. They’re grown-ups embodying the best parts of adolescence. Gather enough of them in one place and put on a decent playlist, and they will weave magic. And they will cuddle.
Such it was, here in this French petri dish of warmth and touch and affection, that two bright green sprouts appeared in the soil of my heart: one springing and withering quickly, the other germinating slowly and deeply.
The first was the Swiss adventurer who entered my life in a whirlwind and left in a tempest.5 She followed me back to Berlin for another dance weekend, I visited her in Switzerland, and we quickly realized that we were not a good match. She chafed at my communication style; I heard too many echoes of a previous relationship. Together, we threw in the towel. Too much conflict, too little harmony.
Rather, it was the second, tender possibility—one that began as a simple dance and conversation in Toulouse—that would unexpectedly transform into the great love and loss of my European summer.
It’s late May, and I’m off to the Netherlands to meet with Dutch officials to secure a 2-year residency permit, succeeding faster than I expected. Now, I am allowed to stay in Europe without leaving every 90 days. Now, I can have some kind of life here. Now, I can dream again.6
Between meetings with the Dutch bureaucracy and before seeing family from the U.S. (whom I convinced to vacation in the Netherlands), I pop down to Belgium to see friends old and new, including that verdant sprout, Nikita.
Blonde, athletic, early-thirties, and a devastatingly talented dancer, Nikita has left the world of NGOs and E.U. politics to teach teens how to inhabit their bodies while working part-time toward prison reform. She’s sharp as a whip, self-aware, and uniquely concerned with justice. In Toulouse we shared a few excellent dances and a rapid-fire conversation about the politics of attraction in dance, and I looked forward to seeing her again. At that point, she was just one of many interesting connections I regularly make in the dance world. As I told her in France, for me, a great dance is just a great dance—it means nothing more. The dance world may be an easy place to discover love, but it’s not a good place to go looking for it.
We meet under a gazebo on a stormy afternoon at the monthly fusion social. We dance together and dance with others, and then the sky opens up and forty rain-soaked park-goers suddenly crowd under the gazebo, our very own captive, dripping audience. Nikita and I share a smile and invite a few curious crowd members to join the dance. Some do, and they love it, laughing and grinning and spinning between the thunderclaps and cloudbursts.
It is a magical reunion charged with an electric sense of possibility. At the end of the dance we step aside to talk, knees touching softly, voices lowered. I ask her if our dances still feel like just dances, or something more. “More,” she says. On the edge of the gazebo we share a kiss and make plans to meet again before I return to the Netherlands. We have crossed the threshold from crush to romance, and it feels like something fresh, strong, and important has begun. Where once stood a fragile green sprout, a fragrant flower grows.
How do you capture a wild Blake?
Invite him on an adventure.
Repeat step 1.
Such it was that Nikita and I found ourselves cycling 500 kilometers along the river Danube, eight weeks after the kiss under the gazebo.
In this time I had closed the chapter with the Swiss adventurer, crossed paths with old friends from California, navigated a lower back blowout7, and spent two more fun-filled weeks with my U.K. crew. The whole time Nikita and I stayed in touch, swapping messages, growing increasingly affectionate, and making plans to attend another fusion weekend together in Germany.
Then she hits me with this:
Want to bike to Budapest together after the dance weekend?
Sweeter words have never been uttered. All my life, I have been the one to pitch adventures to others. Now this beautiful, intelligent crush of mine is selling me on an European cycle adventure—one she will continue without me (yes!) for another week as she cycles onward to Ljubljana with her sister. Hell f’ing yes, Nikita.
Arriving at the weekend, we each worry that we may not feel the same in person after two months apart. But our anxieties evaporate as she swims to hug me in the middle of the nearby river, our bodies happily escaping the afternoon heat and finding each other’s embrace again. We successfully navigate a high-intensity dance weekend (which happens to be organized by Diana), balancing time spent together and apart, co-creating a breakfast for the entire group, and co-facilitating a popular discussion (which happens to be about dance crushes). I enjoy co-ing with her.
Cycling side-by-side along the Danube we talk for hours, diving into each other’s histories, love stories, disasters, beliefs, and hang-ups. For Nikita, no question is too much, no topic too sensitive. Like Ceri in England, she seems willing to share anything and go anywhere, holding values without rigidity, knowledge without hubris, and passion without fundamentalism. Together we smash chocolate bars and bretzels and ice cream bars and tree-plucked apples. We sleep well next to each other. And after 100+ kilometers of sweaty cycling days, she’s always smiling. I am smitten.
After ten full days together, the compression ends, the accordion opens, and we return to our separate lives. She goes back to Belgium for work, I return to Austria for friends and mountains. After seeing old friends in Denmark, I return to the Netherlands by bike and train, and look who’s waiting for me there, just three weeks after I kissed her goodbye in Budapest. It’s Nikita.
It’s only a 24-hour visit, but it means the world to me. Now she’s invited me on an adventure and gone out of her way to see me. (Being the homeless one, I’m usually the one who visits.) In the four years since the tumultuous breakup with my German ex, I had a few brief relationships, and Nikita is the one whose values most align with mine. She feels like an equal in so many ways. She wants a kid in the not-too-near future. And she’s just fun to be around.
Yes, she’s firmly based in Belgium, as I continue to wander the world—but what is wandering for, if not to discover the right place to stop wandering?
Yes, she’s not over her long-term ex, whose name is still on the apartment and stuff is still inside it—but why not become the reason for her to move on?
Yes, she sees a more conventional future for herself, not one of endless bike trips and minimal employment and homeschooling adventures—but, but, but…8
But I like her. A lot. I’m falling in love with her. And why can’t two people in love overcome anything? Why can’t they see life as one long cycle tour, roadblocks be damned? Why can’t love win? (I am, for the record, almost 42 years old.)
I put my bike on a train and we meet once more, three days at her place in Belgium. We dance, cuddle, and cycle through the city. We finish a co-created writing project, discuss future dance weekends, and babysit her neighbor’s cooing 1-year-old.
To me, everything seems great. Full steam ahead! I’m already scheming ways to spend more time in Belgium over the winter. But inside Nikita, something is crumbling. It’s late August, summer is ending, and “real life” with all its busyness is returning... for one of us. For me, it was always real life.
To Nikita, I have been an interesting encounter, someone fresh and different but not necessarily safe or compatible. Too much movement, too much lust for freedom. Too many ties to elsewhere, too unlikely to be satisfied with a single place and person. Nikita is not afraid of international relationships; she’s afraid that what I’m selling is not real. She senses that I am a creature of the summer, best enjoyed when the sun is high, but dangerous to keep around as the days grow short.
A week later, she makes her feelings clear. It is over.
Some years ago, while researching the Enneagram, I stumbled upon a scarily accurate description of my personality archetype.9 It goes something like this:
Types like these are gluttons for optimistically seeing things as they could be in the ideal world of their imaginations. They are dreamers with a need to imagine something better than stark, ordinary reality. They have a passion for embellishing everyday reality, for being too enthusiastic, and for idealizing things and seeing the world as better than it actually is.
It is said that “love is blind.” These types may be blind in this same sense: they display a bit too much enthusiasm and optimism and pay disproportionate attention to the positive data in a situation. They can fall in love very intensely, and they relate to their world through dreaming and imagination. They imagine what the world could be, and they can believe that this optimistic view is real.
Why do I see life as a never-ending adventure? Why do I believe so strongly that friendships should not die? Why do I prize intense reunions and deep talks over slowness and lightness? Why do I idealize fusion dance, or unschooling, or one sweet dancer who invites me on a cycle trip?
Why do I run from the ordinary, painful, and boring parts of life? Why can’t I stay in one place? Why don’t I read the writing on the wall when a romantic interest tells me, through words and deedd, that we are not a good fit?
Why does my brain serve me so well in certain domains and fail utterly in others? When it comes to love, it seems I’ve evolved little over two decades. I still fall hard, rush in, focus on the positive, and ignore the warning signs. Then one day it crumbles, and I push someone away, or they push me away.
Do I actually desire the sensation of falling in love more than the beloved herself? Can I only inhabit a world of endless possibility and minimal pain? And if that world does not exist, where shall I dwell, and with whom?
These are the questions that remain, here at the end of my European summer. The September sun is still high, and a few more adventures beckon: hut-hiking with friends in the Dolomites, a fusion retreat in Italy, another swing through Switzerland and southern Germany. Then it’s time for winter proper: a true Northern European winter, a darkness I’ll attempt to embrace rather than escape. Winters have always been hard for me, but maybe hard is what I need. Raising kids is hard. Growing apart from friends is hard. Mending a broken heart is hard. I’ve spent a long time bouncing from one smiling face, warm embrace, and summer sun to the next. I’ve found so much love in my life of constant motion, but perhaps it’s only been one certain kind of love. Maybe that’s my next thing to discover: my next adventure, my next horizon.✹
See Conflicted Thoughts About Having Kids (March 2024)
See Monday to Friday (April 2024)
I’ve changed some names to protect the innocent.
See Partner Dance is Magic (December 2021)
See Pure Magic (May 2024)
See How to Stay in Europe for 2 Years with the DAFT Visa (June 2024)
See Hobbled in Oaxaca (July 2024)
Belgium happens to be the best European country for homeschooling, at the moment.
Dear Blake - It occurs to me that perhaps you are like Frederick in the children's book by Leo Lionni. In case you are not familiar, or don't see the association, Frederick is a field mouse who lives in a stone wall with other field mice. During the summer, all the other mice spend their time working hard to gather grain and such for the coming winter. They notice that Frederick is not working hard doing the same things and they ask him about it. He says that he is gathering colors, sounds, scents to sustain them in the winter. They are skeptical. But in the depths of winter, when it is cold and dark, and the grain is running low, they turn to Frederick for what he has gathered. And then he feeds their souls with stories of glorious fields and sun-warmed berries.
The analogy I see is that in your once-yearly visits to friends (and in your writing for the rest of us) who have chosen to be tethered to jobs and houses and families, you bring a much needed respite of joy and stories and love and adventure, that feeds their souls. I'm guessing that they look forward to your visits, and that those visits uplift and sustain them, and inject optimism, into their more settled lives, with reminders of what was or what can be, and that they love living vicariously through your adventures. And that is a wonderful thing. Frederick does not doubt himself in his usefulness to his community. Perhaps your purpose is to be a Frederick.
As for the hard things, and your wondering if that is what you need, my two cents are thus. You do not need hard things, nor should you look for them. Hard things will find you (though if you're lucky they don't). If they do find you, and you survive them, they will shape you, provide new perspective, and if one is optimistic, can be a springboard for growth and a different kind of appreciation for life. But the going through them is not generally chosen, it is more thrust upon one at some random and unexpected time. After going through my own hard things, I happened upon a coach who taught me a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), so that now when my brain offers up its usual criticisms and questions, I have learned to say, "I see you brain and I hear you. Now go sit in the back of the bus. I'm driving here and we are okay." If you're not familiar with CBT I recommend it. It has definitely made it easier to live inside my own mind.
Cheers, Alyssa
(In case you haven't made the connection, you may remember me as a fan of your "why are you still sending your kids to school" book, who lives in Maine. We once connected on Zoom a couple of years ago, when I was looking for advice about taking my twin nearly-teens on a trip to Europe. You gave me some excellent advice, and we had a successful trip. This profile is attached to my sewing business and is how I generally connect with Substack.
Your reports are getting better and better. What a storyteller you are. You actually live your life fully which is what generates the stuff for good stories anyway. Thank you for crafting and sharing them. They bring meaning, joy and inspiration, at least to me. They make me wonder: What could I do next? What adventures await? And I have 3 kids (all unschooled right now) so I had my share of settling down. And I had my share of adventure before them too. You make me realize that life comprises of cycles of adventures, broken hearts AND not so much adventurous periods with boredom and routine. It's a merry go round. And we can always chose to hop in or off, as long as we are still alive. Thanks Blake