We Kiss the Same (Dutch) Remastered
How I met Sanne and became her hofnar-jongen
I first saw Sanne through my hotel window. I had just spent two weeks touring Europe with Smith & Nephew, co-authoring a paper on the sources of pain in tissue injuries. As a twenty-year-old undergrad with nothing better to do in the summer of 1994, I had jumped at the chance to present at major medical centers across Europe. Our final stop was Amsterdam, and I was granted one full day of freedom before my flight home the following night.
With actual time to myself for the first time in weeks, my perspective shifted. Perhaps it was the relief, or perhaps Amsterdam truly was the most beautiful place I had ever been. Either way, when I looked outside, I saw her: the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, sitting at a cafe in the small, lush park right outside my hotel.
I initially intended to change out of my suit into something more comfortable for wandering, but I caught my reflection in the mirror. I decided the suit made me look professional, older, even. She seemed a bit older than me, and I figured any help I could get in that department would be a bonus.
I wandered down and approached her table. Out of nowhere, I decided to be incredibly forward and asked if I could join her. I spoke English; she responded in Dutch. I tried French; she shook her head. Then I tried Spanish. That made her smile. She said in her beautiful accent, “Why did you go to all the trouble to learn multiple languages, but not the one for the place where you travel?”
I explained that in the past two weeks, I had been through ten countries and all my French and Spanish had been of no use, especially in France. She laughed and said, “De Fransen zijn pretentieuze klootzakken” (The French are pretentious bastards). I laughed and agreed.
She arched an eyebrow. “Ah, so you do understand some Dutch, then?”
“I think I understood that purely from the context,” I admitted.
“So,” she asked, “did you choose to join me because you needed my help ordering a coffee?”
I gestured toward the empty chair at her table. She nodded. I told her, “I wanted to join you because I saw you through that window,” I pointed up toward the hotel, “and I thought you were the most beautiful person in the most beautiful park in the most beautiful city on a beautiful day. I wanted to meet you because I think I’d like to know you.” When you have only one day for an adventure, there is little reason to be reserved, especially when you’re simply telling the truth.
She replied with a lengthy statement in Dutch that I didn’t catch at all. She paused, then asked in English, “Espresso?”
“Americano,” I said.
She smiled. “Of course.”
As she walked toward the counter to order, she seemed to move in slow motion. The light danced through the large trees shading the park, and little tufts of cottonwood fell slowly around her as she moved. I caught the eye of an older couple at the next table who had been watching the whole exchange with amusement.
“Do you know what she said before she left?” I asked them.
The woman said, “She thinks you are also attractive and admires your confidence. But if she said yes to every American tourist who hit on her…” She smiled and shrugged. The man winked at me. “You have her interest, but she wants a man with specific talents. She wants you to impress her.”
I noticed a crate on their table overflowing with some type of fruit. “Are those apples?”
The woman explained they were perzikrassen (peaches) they had picked that morning. Before she could elaborate, I asked, “Could I borrow three of those?” The woman smiled and motioned for me to take my pick. I found three equally sized, peaches and began to juggle them. The man laughed, and the woman began to clap her hands with excitement.
The noise made Sanne turn around. When she saw me, her smile was beaming. She picked up the coffee and headed back, and I kept the fruit rotating in the air as she approached. She set the cup down in front of my chair and faced me.
“Dus dat is je zet? Wil je mijn hofnarretje zijn? Mijn hofnarjongen?”
The couple kindly translated: “Do you want to be her jester?”
I nodded my thanks to them and turned to her, not missing a beat. “Yes! I’d like to be your hofnar-jongen.” (jester-boy)
She laughed, likely because I slaughtered the pronunciation. “Okay, mijn hof-nar-jon-gen, she said, carefully pronouncing it for my benefit. “Come drink your coffee and tell me about yourself and what you are doing in Amsterdam.”
I caught the fruit, handed them back to the couple, and said, “Bedankt.” The older woman, giddy from the spectacle, waved her hand as if to say the fruit was for us. I offered one to Sanne, thanked the couple again, and sat down to a modest round of applause from the surrounding tables, including a few quiet claps from the woman who had drawn me to the park in the first place.
“So,” she asked, “do you always try to pick up women with your juggling skills?”
“Oh god, no,” I laughed. “It’s hard to think of a worse way to impress a woman than admitting you’ve spent way too much time mastering a completely worthless skill. But when life hands you perzikrassen… you make do with what you’ve got.”
She liked that and said, “Well played, mijn hofnarjongen.” She told me her name was Sanne. We spent hours talking in that cafe. She asked if I wanted Riesling, which I didn’t understand at first, and then explained it was “summer wine, sweet wine.” I said I’d love some, and she waved down the waiter for a bottle. I wasn’t sure what the drinking age was, but I wasn’t about to volunteer any information that might make our age difference a deal-breaker.
We finished the bottle, and I asked if she’d like to get dinner. She pointed to my hotel window. “That is your room?” I nodded.
“We should go there first,” she said. “It is much better to make love with someone for the first time before the sun sets and before dinner. Shall we?”
“I would like that very much,” I replied. “I think I will, too.” She said with a sweet smile.
Sanne convinced me to cancel my flight and stay longer. Our romance was short, but it burned hot. She taught me about Amsterdam, about life, and about making love. I thought I was well-read and experienced, but her approach was more open and communicative than any of my girlfriends. She said things that, in America, would have been considered the most lewd, dirty talk, but the way she said them made them sound like an honest, beautiful acceptance of pleasure. With her I learned how to perfectly match a partner’s intensity because she was so skilled at communicating what she was feeling.
When I told her I was studying medicine but loved writing, she wondered if she and this summer would make it into one of my books. She was certain I would write them one day, and that they would be a fascinating read. Once I had proven myself, the playful sparring ended. Sanne was the kind of person who you want to give all of your attention to and gave you all of hers in return.
The affair ended cleanly and honestly. In that short time, it felt as though we had enjoyed a lifetime’s worth of each other. It’s the kind of connection that is rare and special. When I returned home, we wrote each other sporadically. We were living our own lives.
When the book I wrote started getting picked up by multiple European publishers, I reached out to her letting her know I’d be heading through Amsterdam. She called me, and we talked for hours. Almost immediately I felt as though the last twelve years were compressed into 12 hours. I opened up to her and told her the difficulties I was having. How the American tour had me away from home for long stretches, and how just when I think I’m back for an extended stay, an event or a television interview opportunity comes along that simply can’t be ignored and before I or my family knows it, I’m back on a plane.
I told her how much I missed my kids and how the relationship with my wife had become so resentful due to my absence that all of my attempts to bridge a connection with her fail; and in the few times I was able to break through, an hour later I get a call to shit, shave, and shower because of a promotional opportunity.
My wife loved the money of my newly found success. She was able to quit her job and spend 100% of her time with our new daughter, which she didn’t get to do and regretted when our son was born. But other than the resources I brought to the marriage, nothing more of me was needed or wanted. This caused my resentment to match hers, and resentment is what kills even the best relationships.
To make matters worse I was also still running the two companies I’d founded before getting published, so that meant I was just working all the time. The book needed me to promote it and the companies were not in a place where I could hand them off to anyone else any more than I already had.
I was able to arrange the scheduling for the European tour so I spent multiple days in Amsterdam and even a short return at the end of the tour. She told me she’d go to one of my book signings if I came to one of her concerts. We both kept our promises and that is when I first heard this song. She and three cellists and timpani percussionists played this heart-wrenching song so passionately to an audience of nearly 200 people at Kleine Zaal. On stage, her body movements as she played the cello amplified her passion and the empathetic pain she knew I was feeling.
Though my Dutch was still not anywhere near proficient enough to know everything she was singing, the fact that she chose English for the chorus, “Four-Thousand Miles Away. We still kiss the same. We kiss the same,” told me that this song was not about me as much as it was for me. I’d never seen anything so emotional and so raw. In such Sanne-style, she was using descriptions of human emotion and passion that Americans would find too lewd to whisper, much less wail out in an ornate concert hall.
After the concert, she was being approached by everyone with flowers, congratulations, and accolades, and she deserved every petal and every word. With grace she floated past all of it and when she could have and should have been reveling in her own accomplishment, her attention was completely on me and she made me feel as if I was the only person on earth. It had been so long since anyone who actually knew me, much less knew my real name, had given me any attention, that I found this intoxicating.
It is a strange thing that happens when lots of people are clamoring for the attention of the person that they think you are for what you’ve accomplished. The person that you really are, the part of you that you don’t share, starts to shrink and if that happens too long, it feels like you might just disappear completely.
I spent three nights with Sanne during my first swing through Amsterdam and she desperately tried to talk me into canceling the tour and work on rebuilding myself. At the time that felt impossible. I was already working on an outline for the next book that the American publisher was hoping to have in 10 months.
When I told her I was about to start on the next book she grabbed me. She held me. She whispered to me. “I’m trying to save you, mijn hofnarjongen. This is going to kill you and if this kills you it will break my heart. You won’t survive this. You won’t be able to come back from this and you won’t forgive yourself for missing out on your life. You can’t get this time with your kids. You can still save your family but you can’t give them what they need until you learn to love yourself. This career is toxic, it is poison to you. You don’t owe it your patience. You don’t owe anyone anything more than you can afford to give without destroying the peace that you deserve.”
I did complete all of my events for the rest of the tour and was able to stop back in at the end of the tour, and what she said to me had convinced me she was right. I told her that I would reject the offer for the next book and that when I got back home I’d start rebuilding my life.
I got into therapy with a psychoanalyst who was actually phenomenal. When you are willing to do the work and be honest with your own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, you can move pretty fast through the process. My therapist loved hearing about Sanne and told me that if I’d stayed with her for a month I could have probably accomplished a year’s worth of the work I was doing in therapy.
I started creating healthy boundaries between me and the publicists and anyone that tried to get me to do anything I didn’t genuinely want to do. I even built an impenetrable firewall between myself and toxic members of my wife’s family which she did not initially accept, but eventually realized that she too was better off on my side of that wall.
I resigned from one of my companies and as expected, it was shuttered in a year without my involvement when the remaining partners chose to close the company when it began to fail. I was surprised that I felt no guilt and no shame when this happened. When you learn to love yourself, you don’t owe anyone anything more than what you can afford to give. Because when you make decisions that are the best and healthiest for yourself, you don’t owe patience to poison.
So that is the story of how I met Sanne and how she saved my life. When I began working on the “Conversations with my Younger Self” series, I knew that Sanne needed to play a much greater role in the story than previous writings where I conjured her essence to build a character that represents passion, empathy, and raw sensual radiance.
When I had been informed that she had passed away, my feelings of her finality were not what I would have expected. Sanne was so generous with herself that spending any time with her fills you and sustains you. You don’t miss her because even when you aren’t physically with her, she still feels like she’s with you. She feels like she’s with me right now, right as I type this, and I know she’s smiling saying something like, “Wat is de reden voor deze tranen op dit moment, mijn kostbare hofnar jongen?” Then she’d say something as poetic as it was true, like, “The tears have just as much importance as glimlachen, gelach en orgasmes. Treat them all with acceptance.”
Before I left Amsterdam for the last time she gave me a recording of the song that she made while rehearsing it and I probably played that cassette tape thousands of times. The integrity of the recording was so diminished that remastering was impossible. So I worked with the audio engineers at Ghost to completely remake it as close to the original recording as possible.
Special thanks to Cia who worked for months to deliver the vocals on the song. And super special thanks for the English translated version that allows me to hear this song and fully understand it in ways that make me blush every time. Yes, Sanne, I know, Ik ben een beschamende preutse.
The tape I had didn’t have the cello/timpani accompaniment of the concert but a synthesized piano, guitar and a rhythm machine. I couldn’t bring myself to try to recreate the concert delivery. I think that might be one of those moments that deserves to only exist at the time it existed. “Leef in het heden en waardeer het moment,” as Sanne would likely say. Though if anyone knows if a recording exists of a concert that took place at Concertgebouw Small Hall (Kleine Zaal) on March ~18th-19th 2011, I’d be willing to trade a lot to hear it one more time.
I know that Sanne would likely tell me that I no longer need this song and I’d agree with her and then tell her, “this isn’t for me, it is for someone else that might need to hear it.” And she’d probably say, “Well played, well played, mijn hofnarjongen.”
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