A trip to Paris was on the horizon, and it seemed as if nothing else mattered. The train tickets would be bought, the snacks would be consumed, and the horrors of midterms would be faint memories.
But first Amsterdam would be seen. With the Paris attacks well behind us, it seemed as if Europe—and the world—were healing properly, or as properly as one can move on from such attacks. It’s hard to forget and impossible to forgive, but national healing prompted us to think that we were better than the terrorists.
News channels and politicians alike urged us to not let the fear get to us, to not stop traveling and marveling and learning about our world's culture, and just when we started to do so, Brussels was attacked and we got swung back into the horror and fear that is terrorism.
Our trip to Paris, one that would have put us in Belgium on that fateful morning of March 22nd, 2016 was canceled. Tickets to Paris were deemed to be too expensive, and our time in Amsterdam was too brief to justify a one day, two night trip to Paris. At the time, we did not understand what our impromptu decision to not travel meant.
On the morning of the 22nd, we had slept in, ignoring the world around us, blissfully asleep and dreaming. This ignorance did not last long, however. We woke up to news reports of an attack, and memories from Paris and beyond flooded into our heads. Family reached out and governments put a warning out for Americans traveling abroad, fearing that ISIS would plan another attack within that week.
We did what others did; we fought against the idea that we were unsafe, although nothing really promised us so. We traveled around the Netherlands; we ate chocolate and smoked weed. We dispelled the thought that we would be harmed. We’re not in the city center, we thought, or Amsterdam is too much of an innocent city to scream “Bomb us.” Nothing really could completely convince our worried minds, however, that really, truly, we were safe.
One day, we were sitting by a canal, drinking beer, when we saw a man. Standing alone, with a backpack. He had been there for as long as we had been there, and he didn’t look very suspicious, but the act of waiting around for seemingly nothing seemed suspicious enough for us. We quickly finished our beer and cheese and headed down the street, with the fear of the unknown lurking in our brains.
Our trip to Amsterdam continued uninterrupted and the day came to pack up our bags and return home. Our flights landed on Easter Sunday, however, so our worries were not completely dispelled until we landed on American ground. And even so, the constant fear that an attack could happen at any moment taints our idea of being safe in our own country.
