Without a jacket

Han Nefkens, Rotterdam 1954, writer, collector, patron of the arts. My entire existence reduced to a few words for convenience’s sake in the bio next to an interview in a magazine. And I cannot identify with much of it. I write, I used to collect, I help video artists. But all of that is what I do or did, not who I am.

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My whole life I’ve felt uncomfortable with labels: handicapped, gay, HIV positive, collector, patron, writer, Dutch, expat, and worst of all philanthropist.

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When I was younger, I would stand in front of this wardrobe of identities the way you stand in front of an actual wardrobe on a cold morning, knowing you have to go out, hoping something in there must be right. But nothing ever was.

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Some jackets were too tight — they pressed against something in me that refused to be compressed. Others were so loose they slipped off before I reached the door. Some looked right from a distance but itched the moment I put them on, a persistent irritation just below the skin that no amount of adjusting could relieve. They were simply not me in a way I could never quite explain, the way you sometimes look in a mirror wearing a perfectly good jacket but feel that it belongs to someone else's life.

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I wore the gay jacket for a while — stood in it, walked around, waited to feel at home inside it. I tried the HIV positive jacket, the collector jacket, the writer jacket. Each time with the same result. A kind of politeness between me and the label, nothing more. We tolerated each other without ever becoming acquainted.

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What I understand now, at seventy-two, is that the absence of fit was never the problem. It was the answer. The discomfort I felt was not a symptom of something missing in me but a sign that I was built differently, not for enclosure but for open air.

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What I do feel, perhaps more strongly now than at any other point in my life, is the sense of freedom I had when I was eight years old, running through the fields around our house in a quiet suburb of Rotterdam with my arms stretched out, pretending I was an airplane. The grass was long and slightly wet. The sky was the flat grey white of a Dutch summer morning, that particular light that is neither cloud nor sun, but something suspended between the two. I was going somewhere, to far away countries with palm trees and people who spoke a language I didn’t understand.

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That boy is still running. Still flying. Still discovering a world that keeps opening ahead of him, field after field, without edges and without end.

And still, gratefully, without a jacket.