DEAR STRANGER DIARY: BRUSSELS

Time passes. Feelings float and sink. I arrived in Brussels two years ago because my girlfriend moved here to pursue a masters degree after living and wandering through Australia for too long, and let’s just say it certainly wasn’t a love at first sight kind of ordeal. She moved to Midi. One of the worst areas in Brussels, the kind of area that attracts public masturbators, bloody fists, and drugged-up-day-walkers. The apartment was warm though. The radiators worked very well in the winter. And she lived high up, so we had a view of a statue downstairs that random people would urinate on. I once saw a man pick up a public trash can and throw it at an invisible stranger. Top tier entertainment. If you lived in Midi and somebody asked you what kind of animal the city is, you would most likely choose a rat. It really is that dirty. The only saviour to the place was the food. Around that area you could find killer Moroccan bakeries for very good prices.

Over the course of the first year, I didn’t write any Dear Stranger letters. I didn’t know what to write about. I was going through a writer’s crisis. Everything I relied on for inspiration in Melbourne no longer existed. In Australia, many of the letters I wrote were about the genuine souls living on the street and the wisdom they had to share. But the Brussels homelessness situation was a lot darker. Much meaner. Many of the homeless you saw on the street were families that used children as sympathy porn to try get money from you. I soon realised these families were all connected when I saw them celebrating their earnings in Flagey, Ixelles. A sort of mafia. The more I examined it, the darker it all became, especially when I noticed the same child in three different families, they were passing her around like a purse on a weekly rota. I didn’t want to get involved with this world. Too much darkness, no light.

It wasn’t until Echo moved to Schaerbeek one year later that I finally found inspiration for my letters. Compared to Midi, Schaerbeek was a paradise. An escape from the grime, grit, and having to see random strangers take a shit on the street. I was relieved when she moved there, I no longer worried for her safety while I was working in the UK. Some of the men in Midi were known to stalk girls. Not everybody was bad in Midi, but there were a few more rotten apples than normal.

Echo moved into a beautiful wooden floor apartment full of cactus and kindness shared by two other girls. The buildings surrounding her street were quintessential European-looking-brick-facades, dream-like, and there were no men in packs trying to stare through women’s clothes as they walked past. It felt like she had moved into a different city. I remember feeling very blue and lonely, the winter she moved there. I was unsure what to do or where to go with my life in Brussels. Echo was working. I was in-between jobs, and I didn’t want to just sit and stare at a wall all day while the rain fell out of the sky. The thing with Brussels is that it’s one of the rainiest cities in Europe. Greyscale clouds forever haunting the sky. So this is what I decided to hone in on and use as inspiration for my first Brussels Dear Stranger letter.

I wrote a letter I would want to find on the street. A letter to inject hope into my veins, to help romanticise the beauty Brussels has to offer beneath the rain: kick-ass bookshops, coffee shops, the diversity of the people. I was nervous posting the letter in English since it’s not Belgium’s official language, but I thought ‘fuck it’ and posted it on an electric box anyway. To my surprise, hell broke loose in heaven and people started messaging me. My inbox was flooded with heart-melting-messages from businesswomen, bankers, artists, writers, students, all kinds of souls appeared from out of the rain and thanked me for the letter and shared their view of the city with me, granting me a window into the heart of Brussels through both local and transient eyes. It is through this Dear Stranger project that I realised the heart of Brussels is beating like a drum, loud and strong in all its majestic-multicultural-glory. It opened my eyes to places I had never wandered into, into cultures I’d never usually see. It made me realise the beauty of the city is hidden in the fact that it’s a city full of transient strangers.

It took me a few days to get my head around the sheer volume of messages flooding into my inbox. I received a few messages here and there in Melbourne from my letters, but never to this extent. So in spirit of these responses, I wrote another letter, focusing on loneliness. And just like the first letter, the majority of people responded positively. Through posting these letters I soon realised that the people living here are very lonely in the winter. The winter blues is real, leaking from the majority of people’s eyes when the days are eternally grey. I started focusing on the emotions rattling through my head and translated them into ink whenever they popped up: purposelessness, confusion, sadness, deep-desperate-fading-dreams. Everything got real the day somebody wrote to tell me that one of my letters stopped them from committing suicide. The message brought me to tears, to know something as simple as my words taped to a wall could stop a soul from deactivating their mortal body. Because of this stake-to-the-heart-message I wrote more and more letters and decided to photocopy them and post them all over the city because I believed that these letters were important and that somebody who really needs one is able to find one. The letters became my purpose. And since then, I’ve made it my mission to take this project as far as I can possibly take it because it’s bigger than me now. I am merely the scribe and grunt that works for Dear Stranger. I truly believe, in the heaviest pits of my heart, that this project needs to live on for as long as I can breathe. And I have Brussels to thank for injecting the initial burning flame into the project.

Let’s cut to one and a half years later. I have written so many letters now. Posted over six thousand letters across various cities and countries. Thousands of strangers have messaged me. My letters have been on various news outlets. TV. Radio. Newspapers. BBC. I’ve racked up a decent amount of followers on social media. But all of these achievements are irrelevant. The important thing is that the letters have helped people and are still helping people. Hopefully soon my profile will become big enough for organisations to sponsor my project so I can push it to even higher heights, to travel to Brazil, Mexico City, Mumbai, to do a tour of the United States, hopefully one day I can economically sustain the project. I’ve spent over $20,000 and I am still burning through my savings I accumulated last year from working like a dog, to push this project forward because I truly truly believe this project is doing good and if that means sacrificing my savings, living on the road, sleeping in shitty hostels, travelling as cheaply as humanely possible, for the time being, so be it. But the money spent so far has not been wasted, through posting these letters, they have helped me fall in love with different cities, and they have allowed me to hear the beating hearts that bang through various concrete veins.

It’s wild to think how fast things change. Even though Brussels was the incubator for all the fire Dear Stranger has produced so far, the magical safe-haven called Brussels that once allowed my letters to live and breathe is no more. Now Brussels is one of the most tiresome cities to post letters in. Since the project has become more popular, “more mainstream” in “underground artists” eyes, people are constantly ripping them down. I have an entire community out there trying to locate my letters so they can rip them down. That’s why I never post the location of my letters. Here is a diary I wrote yesterday after catching somebody tear some letters down.

“As much as I want to say the destruction of my letters don’t annoy me, when I see people going around destroying my letters, it ignites a fire in me. The fire to fight back. To post more letters. To write more letters. To post so many letters that the destroyers will tire before finding them all. All in all, the destruction is a positive thing, the destruction of one letter results in three, four, five more getting posted, but the driving force that sends me to the street to post and post and post harder like a rabid animal is a revenge emotion, a burning flame in the eye. Sometimes I like to imagine I’m a cage fighter, stumbling to my feet with ready hands after getting elbowed to the temple. I know these letters are helping people, the messages tell me so, they have even stopped souls from ending their mortal bodies, this is why I am so dead-set towards posting so many letters, so those who truly need a letter can stumble upon one. I don’t care if people think I’m a spammer or an attention seeking whore, I probably am, aren’t we all? I deeply care that the people who really need a letter can stumble into one as if the universe pushed them into my ink. I know the letters are not for everybody, they are for a specific person that needs to hear specific words of encouragement at a specific time, when life keeps beating the shit out of them. Even though I’ve been doing it for four years, to know there are people out there trying to kill hope annoys me. And the more known this project is becoming, the more demons run to the light to tear down the beacon. You would think the longer I do this, the less I care, and to a certain extent that’s true, especially whenever I see a nasty comment, I laugh, but deep down, knowing there are people out there determined to destroy hope boils my blood and only drives me to post more and more hope until my feet become too beat to walk.

It’s 10pm. I can’t see a single letter I posted this week. All of them have been torn down, destroyed by unnamed destroyers. My project is too popular now. Too successful in the eyes of the jealous. If I want to continue on the streets of Brussels, I need to readjust my ammo and think of what to shoot at its walls next. I need to be bolder. Stronger. Unapologetic.”

In a way, this hardship is a beautiful thing. It’s proof that times will forever change and no place or person will ever stay the same. Overall, I still love Brussels and will continue to post my letters regardless, since I owe everything to this city and I will never forget where the project’s roots took to the ground, but let’s see where Dear Stranger’s new home is. As of late, London is becoming the new magical home, but I’m sure times will eventually change too. I’m off to Paris with a set of new letters next week, let’s see how that goes.

Rock and roll wild child. Hopefully you stumble into a letter soon. And if you have already seen one, fire speed through hail and hellfire towards those inferno dreams.