📍 Ghent, Belgium
March 2025
Written from: a wooden table at Bar Bidon, half-lit by a flickering bulb, beside a cup of cold mint tea.
I didn’t mean to come here.
Not to Belgium. Not to Ghent.
Not to this city that smells like river stones and waffles and forgotten books.
The trip was a decision I made one night at 2:14 AM in a towel, clutching a glass of Malbec in my flat back in Whitstable. I’d just finished reading the same text message for the seventh time. The one I never replied to. The one that made my throat tighten and my hands go cold.
So, I booked a ticket to Ghent. Not Brussels. Not Bruges. Ghent — a city I knew nothing about except that it wasn’t where he was.
Day One: A Mistake Turned Shelter
The rain started even before I zipped up my boots.
Belgian skies don’t flirt with clouds — they commit.
It wasn’t a drizzle. It was that type of rain that lands like it knows you’re already fragile.
I took the tram from Dampoort to Korenmarkt, not knowing where I was going. Just riding it to feel the city move beneath me. The windows fogged quickly. A child licked the glass across from me, and his mum laughed like music.
Before I could decide where to walk, I ducked into a small corner bakery with fogged-up windows and hand-written chalk signs. The woman behind the counter smiled. I tried to order a broodje met kaas, but butchered it so badly that she paused, blinked, then gently wrote it down on a napkin. No laughter. No mocking. Just a soft kindness.
I didn’t buy anything. I just smiled, whispered “thank you,” and left — napkin still in hand. It was my first moment of human warmth in a foreign city. And oddly, it mattered.
Eventually, I ducked into a shop called “De Slegte” — a second-hand bookstore with a crooked bell and a coat rack that wobbled. The smell hit me first. Paper, ink, old wood, and winter wool. Safe.
A man behind the counter looked up, then looked back down without a word. My type of place.
I ran my fingers across the spines like they were piano keys. Dutch titles I couldn’t read. French poetry. A random Agatha Christie in Hungarian. I found a copy of The Bell Jar with someone’s handwriting inside:
“For Marijke. Read this only when the world feels too loud.”
I sat in a window seat, the book open, but I didn’t read. I just watched Ghent’s streets blur under the rain.
A Stranger and a Story
It wasn’t until I was leaving that I heard him.
“Don’t buy that one,” he said, English with a Flemish accent. “It’ll ruin your day.”
I turned. He was maybe late thirties. Brown leather jacket, satchel full of crumpled sketchbooks, and eyes that had seen either too much or not enough.
“It’s already ruined,” I replied.
He smiled without smiling.
That should’ve been the end. But it wasn’t.
He introduced himself as Tomas, a local illustrator. I said I was from the UK, but didn’t give my name. He didn’t ask.
We stood beneath the bookstore’s crooked awning for ten minutes in silence, just watching the rain pool between cobblestones. Eventually, he asked if I wanted coffee. I surprised myself and said yes.
Café Galgenhuisje
Tomas led me to a place called Café Galgenhuisje, a crooked little pub wedged between taller buildings like it had been forgotten there. The inside smelled like old beer and burnt sugar. It was warm. Too warm.
We didn’t talk about anything deep at first. He ordered a Kwak beer; I had tea that tasted like boiled socks. He made a face and said, “You Brits and your hot water.”
But slowly, stories slid out.
He used to draw cityscapes for magazines. Now he mostly drew on napkins. He showed me one — a sketch of a woman on a tram, looking away. It could’ve been me.
Or my mother. Or myself, on one of those hollow Tuesdays when I forget why I got out of bed. I didn’t say that. Grief doesn’t like being named. It just… stays. Quietly. In cafés. In rain. In strange men’s sketchbooks.
And I told him — not everything — but enough. About someone who said goodbye too gently. About how I thought I was harder than I was. About how Whitstable sunsets feel lonelier now.
He listened like he wasn’t waiting to speak. Just… held the space.
Before leaving, he handed me a napkin with one line written in Dutch:
“Je draagt de storm beter dan je denkt” (You carry the storm better than you think).
The Walk Back
I walked back alone that evening. The streets glistened under streetlamps. I stopped at St. Michael’s Bridge and looked out over the Leie River. Ghent’s lights danced like memories you don’t want to let go of.
I thought of Tomas. Of the napkin. Of the bookstore with the trembling coat rack.
I thought of you, too.
How strange, the things that come back in unfamiliar cities.
The way your laugh echoes even now in alleys you’ve never walked through.
I didn’t cry.
I wanted to. But I didn’t.
Day Two: Nothing Happened, and That Was Enough
Sometimes, healing looks like nothing at all.
I spent the next day doing nothing remarkable. I sat by the Graslei with a waffle and watched a group of students try to photograph ducks. I browsed soaps shaped like fruit in a shop called Soap & Scent. I bought postcards I never sent. One had a drawing of a fox wearing glasses. You would’ve liked it.
Then I wandered into Patershol — the city’s medieval quarter, all narrow cobbled alleys and quiet window shutters. Lace curtains hung in windows. A piano was playing somewhere behind a red brick wall. I never saw who was playing. I didn’t need to.
I thought about how every stranger hides a universe. How every closed window is just a story not mine to know. And somehow, that calmed me.
I went back to Bar Bidon for lunch. The waitress recognised me. “You’re the tea girl,” she said with a wink.
“Yes. But I’m switching to coffee today,” I smiled.
Baby steps.
A Quiet Goodbye
On my last evening, I returned to De Slegte.
The man behind the counter looked up again. This time he smiled first. I bought a book — Not The Bell Jar. Something lighter. Something hopeful.
As I left, Tomas wasn’t there. And that felt right. Some people are meant to be rain — fleeting, revealing, and gone before you realise you were drenched.
Epilogue — A Letter I Never Sent
Dear You,
I didn’t plan to write. I thought I’d forgotten how.
But Ghent reminded me.
It reminded me that even if we leave places, and people, and cities behind — sometimes we find little pieces of ourselves in strangers, in shop corners, in chalkboard menus scribbled in broken English.
I don’t know if I’m okay yet.
But I’m… becoming.
I think, sometimes, we write letters not for the ones we miss — but for ourselves. We fold the ache into sentences because it’s the only way to carry it. We don’t send them. We don’t need to. Just writing them is enough.
I still have the napkin Tomas gave me. I folded it into the back of my journal. Maybe one day, someone will find it. And maybe they’ll know that I existed — not just as a name, but as a girl who stood in the rain in Ghent and didn’t run.
I hope you’re finding your way too. Wherever you are.
Love always,
S
