Just Being Frank

Just Being Frank

She didn't choose the place. It chose her. So, on a random day in spring, she found herself in central Amsterdam.

For decades, Prinsengracht 263 had perfected inhaling crowds and exhaling souvenirs the moment the doors sighed open. A line of awaiting tourists stretched along the canal like a colorful, undulating ribbon. It was all about guilders; it always had been.

Bypassing the crowds, she slipped in unseen, weightless, yet carrying nothing but the memory of crushing heaviness. The first thing she noticed was the quiet. It was careful, curated, and practiced. It had nothing to do with fear or revelation. It carried the obedience of a library or a church service - places with strict rules on silence.

She remembered a different quiet: footsteps swallowed whole, gunshots and screams followed by utter stillness, a cough or sneeze elevated to a horrific crime, the way the slightest noise could tilt her world into disaster. This new quiet came with captions and pathos.

They did not come for the girl who was desperate for a body that hadn’t yet belonged to her. Nor did they come for the girl who wanted to fall in love, have children, and grow old like her beloved grandma, far more than she wanted to become a depressing lecture. They certainly did not come to enjoy themselves. This bothered her immensely.

They made their way into the narrow room where her sleeping quarters had been for two years, where her words had been steps on a secret ladder. This shrine seemed to want to entrap her permanently.

A recording played softly - a young girl’s voice reading her lines with a dramatic tremor. Tilting her head, she listened. The perceived philosophical sentences lingered, polished until they gleamed. The harder lines were softened, contextualized, or excised entirely. In the end, she’d been a teenager edited by her father.

The docent moved from room to room, and she followed, already knowing the places to duck, a lingering practical habit serving no purpose anymore. The docent spoke gently and respectfully about courage, resilience, and belief. She felt a pinch of irritation, like a hangnail. Belief was not the point. Survival was.

She had believed because she was too young to know any different. Because hope felt like oxygen, and the alternative was far too burdensome for any child to carry. But her belief hadn’t saved her, nor had her words. Neither had fed her. Nor had they kept the doors shut. They didn’t change anything at all for her.

Paper is more patient than people. And writing was what kept her going day after day. Biding her time as she bore witness, while thriving on private narratives never meant for anyone else to read. They’d missed the point, especially her father, who had been her favorite person in the world.

A teenage boy, seemingly lost in thought, traced his fingers along the etched height markings, which had long ago tracked her growth; back then, more for medical purposes than for whimsy. The final scrape at fifteen - likely his own current age. His eyes focused on a quote on the wall, large, almost garish:

Despite everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.

He looked up and met her eyes. Can he see me? For a moment, she wanted to reach out and touch him. She wanted to tell him...

I didn’t write to be good. I wrote to escape. Read the parts where I am ugly. Read the parts where I am cruel, conceited, and jealous. The parts where I am afraid of myself more than the enemy. The parts where I don’t know what to do with my desires. If you only read what comforts you, you will erase me again.

In the next room, a glass case held a replica of her diary, a red, black, and white tome. It was much smaller than she recalled. The real one was elsewhere, protected, temperature-controlled, immortal. This one displayed a few very well-selected passages.

Vacationers leaned close, awed, without touching, as if the glass might shatter under the weight of their consumption. She hovered above, embarrassed. The diary had been her friend when friends were too loud, too dangerous, too present, then gone. It had invited her in and listened without asking her to become anything more than just a girl with secrets and dreams.

She did not write for these people. She did not bear her soul so others could find solace in her treachery. She wrote so she could tell her truth, her own story of survival, totally unaware it would never be told in full. That life would be cut short six months after her last entry.

The house guided people onward, past the kitchen, past the attic, and into a gift shop. It was an addition so as not disturb the landmark structure. The store was bright and smelled of paper, ink, and money. Her face was everywhere - a girl frozen forever at fourteen.

A woman picked up a notebook embossed with her shiny, smiling image. She’d hated that picture, and it was everywhere, including the entire side of the building. What a harsh reality in the otherwise laid-back, liberal city filled with cyclists, smokers, and coffee shops - where permissiveness was a given. A dichotomy.

As for the woman about to buy her face on a blank template, she wanted to say...

"Use it. Write lies, then truths. Spill ink. Rip out pages. Don’t keep it clean in my name. Fill it with yourself and for yourself. Write as if no one will ever read it.”

She floated up to the attic, where she had once watched a chestnut tree sway and change, proving that time still existed. The tree was gone. The attic window framed the sky like a painting that refused to let in the truth. She pressed her palm to the glass and felt nothing. An odd ache surprised her anyway.

The window reflected strange faces and images as they moved behind her, holding up phones like votive candles. As if these tourists could somehow capture her essence in a long, uninhabited space. The irony of it did not escape her.

They had told her story so often that it had hardened. It became a shape that fit syllabi and speeches. It was sanded down until it could be easily held without splinters. They had taken her anger, fear, and desire, and neatly folded them into belief, bravery, and brilliance. They turned her many contradictions and notes in the margins into philosophical quotes.

She passed a group of teenagers whispering, suppressing smiles. One girl wiped away tears. She wanted to sit beside the girl and say, “Crying is not a performance. You don’t owe anyone your tears. You don’t have to leave here better than you arrived.”

Near the exit, a screen played interviews - historians offering context, caretakers explaining the preservation of necessary passages. Careful words. She felt something like gratitude braided with dissent. Preservation mattered. Context mattered. Memory mattered. But so did the mess. She was not a monument or a poster child for hope. She was a teenage girl waiting for the war to end so she could tell her own stories. These artifacts, and her diary, froze her in time, forever an unfinished story.

She lingered as the last visitors filed out. The house breathed in relief. The quiet annex shifted, more honest and unafraid of its own ghosts, until the next expectant crowds would cross its threshold the following day.

Outside, night folded in, and the house stood still while the canal continued to flow as it always had. She felt herself thinning, the way spirits do when they’ve stayed too long. Before leaving, she took one last look behind the false bookcase, which, like a great novel, held up for as long as it could.

Lighter now, she drifted back to the small room where she had filled most of those pages. She envisioned the pencil in her hand, the scrape of graphite, the way a sentence could feel like a message passed forward. If she could write one last entry, it would read:

Dearest Kitty - I don’t want this to be my legacy. But if they must tell my story, don’t make it behave. Don’t make it useful. Let it argue. Let it refuse. Let it be young, loud, and alive. And when you leave this house, don’t congratulate yourself for feeling sad. Do not monetize me. Live the sort of existence I’d have wanted to live. Run in the streets, take in the fresh air, make some noise. Never hold back on anything - not the laughter, the rage, the tears, or the passion. Remember me not as an answer or a history lesson, but as a girl who desperately wanted to live to tell her own true story. Yours, Anne