gaze

 

                                                           

There is apparently a trend on Instagram to visit beautiful places
and cry alone.

Sometimes it is the beauty itself,
too vast, too radiant, breaking the heart open.

Sometimes it is this: the beauty remains,
but there is no one with whom to share it.

For me, it was the latter.

This was my second journey through Europe as a single person.

and the second time, leaving alone.

The first trip surprised me with its weight.

The pain of familiarity.
The second arrived with expectation,
not reckless hope,
but the quiet kind shaped by stories we read,
films we remember, Serendipity and People You Meet On Vacations,
the small promise that life might meet us halfway.

It did not.

The journey, after all, was academic,
papers presented, arguments defended,
larger purposes pursued.

Yet nowhere in my plans did I imagine singlehood
as a destination in my forties.

On a nightout in Haarlem,
I paused on a narrow bridge,
canals glimmering under soft yellow lights.
My peers moved ahead,
but for a moment I lingered.
wanting to be alone,
to let the loneliness speak,
to accept it without resistance.

The cobbled streets were dim and cold,
I wondered if they mirrored my own reality.

I swallowed hard and held back tears.
There was still a long walk ahead.

And the question arose, uninvited, unrelenting:
Is this it?

I had prayed.
I had fasted.
I had waited.
Two years accepting solitude, and now down on my third.
No glances held too long, no batting of my eyelashes,
no digital marketplaces of affection.

Like the daughters of Jerusalem,

To never awaken or arouse the temporal.
My standard was simple, uncompromising:
a man after God’s own heart.
Anything less, I removed, deleted, blocked.

Surely, good things come to those who wait.

Still, nothing.

Sometimes I joke to soften the truth:
2024, single.
2025, single—pro.
2026, single—pro max.

Still, my trip among the beautiful places, 

From the soft lights of Haarlem to the majestic towers of Ghent,
from Monschau’s quaint streets to the distant trains of Köln,
I met no one.

Only once,
a brief conversation beside a window,
a tall, thoughtful stranger bound for Berlin.
We spoke briefly about the delayed trains, smiled and exchanged wishes for safe journeys.
And that was it.

Home again,
the familiar questions closed in.
Did you really meet no one, again?

I smiled, thinly.
I had gone to present research,
not audition for companionship.

And yet in the quiet aftermath,
scrolling through images of beauty and distance,

I felt tears swelling up, 

again. 

But this time,
Scripture found me. 

It held me and comforted me, wrapped its arms around me, 

as if to soften the blows of societal and cultural expectations.

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told from the beginning?

Why do you say,
My way is hidden from the Lord,
My cause dismissed by my God?

The Creator of the ends of the earth
does not grow weary.
He gives strength to the faint
and power to the weak.

Those who hope in the Lord
will rise, they will run, they will walk.

Words first spoken to a people who felt forgotten,

abandoned, weary, broken, left out...
Now speak to me.

And perhaps to every weary believer
who waits and wonders...

So then,

Don't despair, don't be ashamed, don't lower your gaze, 

This is our reality.
Our cause is higher, our calling divine, our eyes lifted,
Undiminished.

Perhaps the destination toward which we are all being drawn
is not romance, nor arrival,
but faith refined in solitude,

Especially for those
who travel to beautiful places
and learn to weep alone.