What We Learn from Beauty, Kindness, and the Quiet Turns of Fate aka the magic of life

If you’ve never fallen for two brothers in the same year, you’ve missed a shortcut to understanding both family dynamics and your own capacity for chaos. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even see it coming. But there I was, cycling through town with one and then, weeks later, skipping class with the other. In my defence, it was the eighties, and the polder was new, and so was I.

Mid-eighties. I was the new girl at a school where the student body was a mosaic of races and blue-collar dreams—families drawn to this freshly drained polder, this constructed town, all seeking a better life on new land.

I didn’t exactly blend in. My Lemmy coat, leather backpack, and—let’s not forget—the Cartier jewellery, courtesy of my four-year-older uncle (a hustler and my favourite of the family, but that’s another story), all made sure of that. I was a walking contradiction: an Amsterdam aristocrat with street smarts wrapped in a veneer of accidental luxury.

But what really didn’t go unnoticed was the most beautiful boy I’d ever laid eyes on. His symmetry was almost mythic; his voice was a low, velvety that could make even the science teacher pause mid-equation. He was an introvert, orbiting the school with just one friend, impervious to the swooning girls and the general adolescent chaos.

Naturally, I made it my mission to learn everything about him—the boy who didn’t yet know he was destined to be my boyfriend. He was a future soccer star, training every afternoon, focused, disciplined, and untouchable.

I was noticeable enough myself, so it didn’t take long for him to glance my way. Just glances, though—until that fateful afternoon in the science classroom when we both inexplicably started humming “When a Man Loves a Woman.” That was it. From that day, we walked together and eventually sealed our mutual butterflies with a kiss.

But before that kiss, there was a minor war to wage. The class bully—team leader of the mean girls and, inconveniently, harbouring a massive crush on my beautiful boy—decided to make me her target. She stole my backpack, thinking to put the new girl in her place. What she didn’t know was that I’d survived Amsterdam, and I’d learned a thing or two about human hierarchies.

So I marched straight into the lioness’s den, reclaimed my backpack, and left her and her lackeys momentarily stunned. But revenge is a dish best served with backup: she and her big sister ambushed me after school, surrounding me with all the subtlety of a street gang. The sister launched into the classic “you’re first in line for a smacking” speech. But I noticed her tattoos—familiar symbols from Amsterdam’s underbelly—and realised exactly who she feared. I bluffed, invoked the right names, and walked away unscathed, though my knees were knocking.

Victory tasted sweet. I celebrated by parading through school and town, hand in hand with my beautiful boy, cycling through the streets as if we owned them.

But here’s the thing about beauty: it fades into boredom if there’s nothing underneath. My ennui evaporated the day his older brother strolled into school—taller, sharper, with a mind as quick as his wit and kindness that didn’t need to be advertised. I did what any self-respecting anthropologist-in-training would do: I observed, I strategised, and, inevitably, I made my move. Soon enough, the older brother and I were an item. In the end, the heart isn’t loyal to logic, and desire rarely consults the family tree. Where the first was all surface and symmetry, the second was substance: intelligent, sweet, and actually interesting.

Anthropological Aside

There’s a curious logic to the way affections sometimes migrate within the same family. Call it proximity; call it the echo effect—when you’re drawn to a specific energy, it’s not surprising to find its resonance in a sibling. It’s not about conquest or collection but about seeking familiarity in a different key. The heart, after all, is less a strategist than a creature of habits and patterns.

As for my old classmate, she wasn’t keeping score—she wasn’t even playing the same game. To keep score, you need to know the numbers to understand the stakes. She was simply acting out a script she’d never bothered to read, mistaking proximity for possession and drama for destiny.

Years later, on a staircase in a foreign country, our paths crossed again—her descending, me climbing up, and some hapless guy in tow, a guy I’d once let sleep on my couch out of misplaced charity. She gave me a look and tossed out, “Now I take yours.”

I almost laughed. He was never mine, nor did I want him. Just as the boy in high school was never hers, she wasn’t keeping score—she didn’t even know what game we were playing.

Some people chase shadows. I prefer to walk in the sun.

May Harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra

P.S.
Names have been changed out of respect for privacy. This story is a memory—one that holds both the laughter and the complexity of youth, and is shared here with care. In the end, it all comes down to how we choose to see the chaos: as a miracle handed to us by a mischievous universe, or just another lap in the endless, slightly absurd race called life. Personally, I prefer to treat it as magic—because if you’re only keeping score, you’ll miss the real tricks entirely