Wednesday Evening Thoughts: Den Haag, May 13, 2026

It’s chilly tonight. I fear I might be coming down with something again, despite not yet having fully recovered from the flu that left me bedridden for a week only a few weeks ago. I am also apparently having an allergic reaction to something, though my elimination-and-substitution experiments have yet to reveal what exactly is trying to finish me this time. Lucky me.

I’m sitting on my bed now, propped against the headboard with my laptop balanced on my lap. Only my face and one hand are unclad because, I have decided tonight would be a good time to experiment with typing one-handed.

Before getting into bed, I looked at myself in the mirror and swiftly turned away because I did not like who I saw or the defeat written so plainly across her face.

Defeated by whom? Or by what?

Well, let’s unpack the day. Maybe somewhere in the telling, I’ll arrive at the answer. Or maybe not.

Argh! What a day. What an interesting day. I thought I had already experienced emotionally intense moments this year, but today has been a different story.

The day itself began ordinarily enough. I woke up at 6:26 AM, four minutes before my 6:30 AM alarm could assault me with that dreadful sound I hate so much, yet will not change, and swiftly turned it off. Yet I didn’t get out of bed until 6:34 AM because I was tired AF.

I had planned to leave for the office around 8 AM, but the trains kept getting canceled, so I ended up delaying my commute by several minutes. Lucky me, though, I managed to get to the office well before my first meeting of the day.

I was standing on the train platform, waiting and reading Wuthering Heights, when I came across Catherine Earnshaw describing her affection for Heathcliff. I was still reeling from it all, rereading what might genuinely be one of the most fascinating and passionate declarations of love I have read in a long while. Never mind that I just finished Last Letter from Your Lover by Jojo Moyes.

When the train finally arrived, and I got on, not long after, I pulled out my machine to work when my colleague texted to say they had dropped the book I had lent them in my team’s locker. I asked what their favorite piece in the anthology had been, expecting maybe one answer, but they mentioned three different pieces, which delighted me because it confirmed they had genuinely loved it. So up African (Nigerian) literature!

They also brought up the first chapter, which, in the interest of preserving your sanity, I will not dissect here again. I have already written about those opening lines and the emotion they stirred in me.

But this is where the day gets interesting!

Work itself was fine until I had a call for a program I’m participating in through work, and that conversation nearly made me cry. I managed not to break down, thankfully. Not that it would necessarily have been catastrophic if I had.

The weather outside was miserable, as one would expect of the Dutch weather, so afterward I could not even go for a walk to clear my head. I returned to work while still trying to process everything we discussed.

I am not comfortable baring my soul entirely to you all. One person was enough for today; maybe enough for a lifetime. But here is what I can say about the call.

Aside: I am using both hands to type now. I’m in the zone.

Somewhere in my drafts is a piece about why I write. Tonight is not the night I will finish it because I am too exhausted to make it decent for anyone but me. But during that call, the person on the other end began reading back to me something I wrote in March, and in that moment I understood, more clearly than ever before, why I write at all.

Not because they praised my artistry, though they did, but because everything else disappears. Spoken words fade; they perish almost instantly in the listener’s ears and are thwarted by their imagination and memory. But written words, not so much.

Letters are the only parts of us that survive our breath. They stand witness long after the speaker has turned to dust, as I (and I think everyone) have been privileged to read essays from people long dead.

And no matter how much I appear to speak these days, little enough actually, know that I write ten times more. Some of it gets published, but most never will, lest I get confined.

…

Life itself has already moved on from the girl lying on a rug on a rainy day in Amsterdam, writing the words that were later read back to me today. That version of me is gone already, but the words remain, and they will remain for as long as time does. And even when time itself ceases, there will still be remnants of them marked somewhere in the dark (how does time work again? lol)

But as they read it to me, I also realized cowardice, and perhaps that too is why I write. The coward’s medium. The refuge of people who cannot bear to say certain things aloud and instead hide behind screens, notebooks, and carefully arranged sentences to make declarations (heartfelt sometimes) they could never survive speaking face-to-face.

But thinking back on the call now, I realize that beyond recognizing my own cowardice (for the first time), what actually left me emotionally ravaged were the questions. Specifically, the whys.

At some point, every answer I gave was met with another question. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

And as some of you might know, there is no question I love more than why and it felt like they were speaking my language, until at some point during the excavation of my psyche, I realized I had run out of answers to their “whys.”

And that was disturbing because… why? Why had I reached the end of myself so quickly?

I have another unfinished draft somewhere about my obsession with why, but the condensed version is this: Nietzsche once wrote, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” So, I ponder right now, do I not have a “why” and if so, “what does that mean for me?”

…

It was a good call. A very good call, actually. But it was so emotionally intense that it left me questioning, who Olufunke Moronfolu is (my name, just in case you are wondering). By the end of the call, I told them I was leaving more frustrated than when we started because they had asked me questions I could not answer. And of course, they asked me “why”. Haha!

The call lasted only an hour, but I do not think anyone has ever pierced through me the way they did today, not even when I was cut open on an operating table.

I feel like I have never bared my soul to another person the way I did today, even though they insisted I still wasn’t fully forthcoming. Which, interestingly enough, shows that they saw through my favorite trick of saying a great deal without actually saying anything at all.

It has been, what, nine hours since then?

Since that call, I have gone to a pub quiz, danced and drank with strangers, spent hours on the phone with friends and family, laughed like all is well with me and the world, gave my friend terrible advice and told them that if the consequences of their actions do not outweigh the reward, then perhaps fear should not stop them, found a TV stand I liked and ultimately got it for my home (now, I just need the TV, lol), accidentally ended up on the wrong floor of my building and tried to open someone else’s apartment door until they came outside, and we both yelled “WTF” at each other in mutual horror (I have been distracted and basically just a walking shell), and wandered around my new neighborhood.

And somehow, after all of that, I still feel exactly as I did at 2 PM when the call ended. Raw. Open. Alive. Enlightened. Excited. Sensitive. A chaos of emotions I still cannot properly name.

So, like I said at the start, what a day.

I willingly, yet unknowingly, signed up to do something that ultimately allowed someone to strip away all the noise and leave me alone with the parts of myself I can endlessly write around but still cannot fully explain. I am now faced with the realization that beneath the performance I give of myself, there are still parts of me I refuse to confront because I am afraid of what I might find there: confusion, disappointment, awe, affection, nothing?

So as I write this tonight, I still do not fully understand what today means. I am only trying to capture it before time does what it does to memory, in the hope that one day I will reread these words and remember exactly what it felt like to be this cracked open like I do to the boiled eggs I eat every morning. And perhaps, when I return to this moment, months from now, I will finally have answers for the things that left me feeling so unbearably naked today.