BRUSSELS. A City of Strangers.

Time passes. Feelings float and sink. I arrived in Brussels two years ago because my girlfriend moved here to pursue a masters degree after we had lived and wandered 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 my letters I wrote were about…