ALL MY LOVE ALWAYS
“These look like engagement photos,” Mads laughed as we looked at the pictures we had taken at Keukenhof, the famous tulip garden in the Netherlands. It was our second year living in Leiden, and by now we knew that spring was when the Dutch landscape was at its most beautiful.
“Oh my God, we really do look like a couple!” I agreed. In one photo, Mads and I were posing in front of a patch of yellow tulips. In another, we were in front of some cherry blossoms, and in another, we were sitting with our legs touching in a gazebo draped in flowers.
In many ways, we were like a married couple. We had been roommates for nearly a year and a half, and we weren’t the kind of roommates who just shared a space, but otherwise lived their own separate lives. We cooked dinner together every night, went grocery shopping together, planned special outings for each other’s birthdays, and took care of each other when we were sick.
One cold, damp evening a few months back, I was on the train home to Leiden after visiting an old friend in Tilburg when I started feeling feverish and my throat began to hurt. I texted Mads saying I felt sick, and when I walked through the door shivering, she had a bowl of homemade chicken soup ready for me on the table. I changed out of my wet clothes and we ate our soup and watched Supernatural together until it was time for bed.
When Mads had important final papers due for her international relations classes, I was the person she trusted to proofread them and give her feedback before she turned them in. If one of us was having a bad day, the other would go to the convenience store across the street for a bottle of cheap wine or a pack of Oreos. We were there for each other through heartbreak, family crises, and stress-filled exam weeks. I knew that no matter how bad things got, I always had her.
We walked quietly through the fields of tulips, just taking in the view. Every now and then she would mention something about how her grandmother, who was a botanist, would have loved it there. I smiled at her stories about her family, many of which I had heard before, but I didn’t mind hearing them again. I choked down the lump in my throat when I remembered this would be our last spring together. In less than a month, I would be leaving the Netherlands to move to New Mexico to be closer to my family who had moved there the previous year. But I didn’t want to think about goodbyes just yet. I wanted to look at the tulips bobbing in the wind and listen to Mads talk about the irises her grandmother used to grow.
Mads and I became close our freshman year at Webster University. At the beginning of the school year, she was just the girl in the dorm room next to mine. We had a couple of classes together, like the freshman English class and seminar we all had to take, but I was majoring in media communications and she was majoring in international relations, so we didn’t really talk much at first.
It wasn’t until a few weeks into the semester when we went to the freshman mixer that we started to get to know each other. She was from Buffalo, New York, but her family had spent the last couple of years living in Athens, Greece because her father was an international school principal. I told her my family was living in Spangdahlem, Germany because my dad was military.
After the mixer, we got ready for a house party together in her dorm. Someone from our school was throwing a costume party, and we decided to dress as different decades with some other freshman girls. Mads wore a vintage red and black polka-dot ‘50s style dress with Mary Jane heels. Another girl in our group wore a ‘20s flapper dress, while another channeled a Rosie the Riveter look. I decided to go ‘80s with a mini skirt and teased up hair. At the party, we talked and smoked and drank for hours. We walked a black out drunk girl back to the dorms together at the end of the night to make sure she got home safely. Mads and I both had that caretaker instinct that came with being the eldest daughter in a dysfunctional family. This was the shared characteristic we bonded over the most. We both were the person our younger siblings counted on—the extra parent when one or both of our parents were too unstable to be there for them emotionally.
It was Mads who was my rock when I took her and some of our other friends to Germany one weekend in December for the Christmas markets. We stayed with my family, and when my parents had an explosive fight that ended in a suicide attempt, it was Mads’s hand I squeezed for support.
“They can’t even go three goddamn hours without a fight,” I said when we were out at a bar later drinking Bitburger. “We were at the house for three hours and they couldn’t keep it together.”
“I know how that feels,” Mads said. “I know what it’s like trying to hide your family’s problems and make everything look normal. I did it for years. I still do it every time I go back home and see my parents and sisters.”
When we went back to the Netherlands, we decided we would move in together. Both my roommate and hers were moving to their own apartments, so I moved my things into Mads’s dorm the following semester. Once we started living in the same dorm room, we spent roughly 99% of our time together. Where Mads went, I went, and vice versa.
People began to think we were a couple, and I didn’t mind. It actually worked out in our favor when we went out to bars and clubs since it kept the creepy men away. I mean, we did make out aonce when we were wasted off of free birthday drinks at our favorite bar, so the assumption that we were an item was understandable. Not that it happened often, and most of the time we would just get drunk and discuss a wide range of topics, typically starting by talking shit about people who annoyed us at school, then moving on to an in-depth discussion of an anime we were watching, and then onto feminist theory, how to solve gender inequality, and barriers to women in the workforce, as if we knew everything at the ages of eighteen and nineteen.
I don’t think either of us had ever had someone in our lives who was just there for us 24/7 before. Mads and I were the kind of friends where it didn’t matter if it was four a.m., we knew we could call the other if we were in a bad situation. I didn’t have to wonder if she would use something I said to her in confidence against me later. She had my back and I had hers.
We never spoke unkindly to each other. I kept bracing myself for it, wondering when we would fight about something. After all, we were spending all of our time together. I figured odds were at some point, there would be something we would fight about, but it never came. In fact, the only time we ever even used an irritated tone with the other was after our trip to Ireland the fall of our second year of college. We had enjoyed five days in Dublin, but we made the mistake of going on a pub crawl the night before our flight back to the Netherlands. Being tired, hungry, and hungover on the train ride from the Eindhoven airport back to Leiden was… unpleasant. But we only snapped at each other once about something stupid. I don’t remember what it was now. Maybe the placement of a suitcase on the floor in the aisle instead of under the seat? Both of us seemed to realize that we were being unreasonable, so we shut up until we got some food and felt better.
It was the little things about her I would miss the most. The way she loved the spice aisle at the Turkish grocery store. She always bought too many new spices (how much cardamom did we really need?!), but she would find a way to fit them all on our makeshift spice rack in the tiny dorm kitchen. I would miss the way she complained that her hair was becoming a mullet when she would go too long between hair appointments and her short-cropped pixie cut grew out at an awkward length. I would miss her impassioned monologues as she explained some of the U.S.’s failed foreign policies to me, of which I was totally ignorant before I met her.
A couple weeks after our Keukenhof visit and after our final exams, Mads and I had an appointment to get matching tattoos of the Leiden city symbol—a pair of crossed keys. It was the first time either of us had gotten a tattoo, and like everything else we had done for the past two years, we were doing it together. I got mine done first, and it didn’t hurt too much since it was on my thigh. I was surprised that I hardly felt a thing besides some light stinging. When it was Mads’s turn, I held her hand as the tattoo artist put the needle to her skin. Hers was more painful since it was right on her hip bone. Luckily since it was a small tattoo, it was quick.
“We have these on our bodies forever!” I said, hiking up my skirt to look at my tattoo again once we got back to our dorm.
“I know! It looks so cool!” Mads kept staring at hers, too, tracing the outline with her finger. We both looked in the mirror, tattoos raw and covered in plastic wrap, absolutely thrilled. I loved that no matter where we went in the world, we would always have the same piece of Leiden.
As excited as I was about the tattoo, it filled me with a new sense of dread. With the tattoo appointment done and over with, I had less than a week left in the Netherlands. Less than a week left with Mads. I didn’t know how I was going to function without her when I transferred to the University of New Mexico in the fall. The thought of waking up in my new bedroom an ocean away and not seeing her asleep in the bed on the other side of the room was terrifying.
When my last full day in the Netherlands finally came, I decided I wanted to go to the Rijksmuseum with Mads and our other friends, Kiyu and Stef. We spent the afternoon perusing the most famous works by Rembrandt and Vermeer.
“There won’t be anything like this in New Mexico,” I muttered as Mads and I stood in front Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. I was only half referring to the painting.
I bought some souvenirs for my family before we headed to Amsterdam Centraal to catch a train back to Leiden. Kiyu and Stef said they would meet us the next morning to see me off at the airport. They had to get to work, so they hopped on a different train. Mads and I were meeting up with two other friends, Chris and Weini, for dinner at a Dutch pancake restaurant across the canal from the dorms. I wanted to make sure I got a chance to see everyone one more time before I left, and of course Mads accompanied me on the goodbye tour. I ordered my favorite savory pancake with bacon, apple, and cheese and genuinely enjoyed myself. Mads and I talked and laughed with Chris and Weini like it was just a regular Monday evening, but of course it wasn’t.
After the pancakes were eaten and the bill was paid, I said goodbye to Chris and Weini, knowing it was unlikely we would cross paths again. They were Dutch and Chinese nationals with no intention of going to the States any time soon, and I probably wasn’t returning to Europe for a long time. Who knows if they would even still be living there if I ever went back? We would remain Facebook friends, but the likelihood of us meeting up again in person was slim.
Mads and I left the restaurant and stopped for a while on the bridge over the canal to watch the sunset. In less than twelve hours, I would be on a plane above the Atlantic. I silently begged the sun not to slip behind the windmill in the distance. It set anyway, and the streetlights came on, signaling it was time for Mads and me to head home together one last time.
We didn’t say much on the train ride to the airport the next morning. Kiyu and Stef met us at Leiden Centraal, and they were quiet too. What was there to say? When we got to Schiphol, Mads and the others helped me drag my bags off the train. I hugged Kiyu and told her maybe someday I could visit her in Tokyo when she moved back there. I promised Stef we would meet up in Queens after graduation. I didn’t cry until it was time to say goodbye to Mads. I knew I would see her again. I had to.
I can’t remember what I said to her in the moment. Probably “I’ll miss you.” Probably “I love you.” I just remember crying into her shoulder and hugging her as people rushed around us to catch their flights. When I finally let go, I wheeled my giant suitcases onto the escalator to the check-in area. I looked behind me and waved tearfully at Mads before my view was obstructed by the next floor. The process of checking my bags, going through security, and getting on the plane was a blur.
As the plane took off, my mind played a whirlwind of memories from the last two years. The time Mads and I tried pot brownies for the first time and then watched The Hobbit completely stoned. The time we almost lost Weini, Kiyu, and Stef in Ireland because they didn’t get on the tour bus with us and we had to run around the village of Doolin to find them. The time my siblings called me in the middle of the night saying that our parents had a bad fight, and I felt helpless and sad, and Mads stayed up all night with me and talked. I held onto these memories in my mind like Rosary beads, praying that they wouldn’t fade away.
A few days after I arrived in New Mexico, I was unpacking my suitcases when I found a letter from Mads. She must have slipped it in there the night before my flight to Albuquerque.
Dear Madison,
This note is not a goodbye, just a farewell for now. The other day I woke up from a nightmare and saw you across the room. Your presence reassured me that everything was alright and that the bad dreams would go away. As I packed up our room today, all I could think about was our memories here together and how much I will miss you. I don’t know what I will do without you.
You have been my best friend and sister for the last two years, and I have been so blessed to have been able to find a friend to open up to and share my past and my dreams for the future. You took my fears and anxieties, and instead of pitying me, you lifted me up and supported me. I could not have asked for a more compassionate and sincere friend.
Your passion for education and your kindness inspires me every day to be the best version of myself. Thank you for taking my first steps into adulthood with me. This note leaves out so much more that I wanted to say. I just wanted to let you know that you are amazing and inspiring, and if you ever need me, I’m just a message or call away. I would fly halfway around the world for you. If you ever need anything, just contact me. If you’re stressed or sad or frustrated, just contact me, and I will support you always.
I wish you the best in New Mexico, even though I know you’ll kick ass and don’t need any luck! I am sending you off with love and will always be your supporter and fan. You are going to flourish at your new school and master driving with no problems!
All my love always,
Mads
