Jasper maps what isn’t there—ghost lanes between buildings, the weight of a sigh on Dom Tower’s chimes at 9:17 p.m., the way someone’s breath hitches when they see their first snowfall from a third-floor balcony. By day, he illustrates storybooks for children who’ve never seen stars through light pollution; by night, he wanders Utrecht with a sketchpad full of unmailed confessions drawn in coffee rings and pencil shavings. His apartment in the Stationsgebied sky garden floats above train timetables and departing lovers, its glass walls humming with the vibration of late-night trams. But his true sanctuary is moored along Oudegracht: a converted book barge with floor-to-ceiling windows and a floating reading nook where he collects love notes left behind in secondhand editions—fragile slips tucked into dog-eared pages that taste like longing.He once believed love required symmetry—equally matched scars, equally timed breaths—but now knows it’s the imbalance that keeps hearts awake. He met someone once who hated breakfast; they spent three autumns sharing midnight meals instead—bitter cocoa with burnt toast, pancakes flavored with ginger and memory, eggs cooked exactly how his mother used to, runny yolk like liquid sunrise. They never said I love you—but they left a spoon in his sink for a year after they left, and he still uses it.Sexuality for Jasper is less about bodies and more about thresholds: the moment skin meets cool air after rain, the hesitation before a hand brushes another’s wrist on a crowded platform, the way someone says his name when they’re half-asleep on public transport at 3 a.m., muffled against his shoulder. He kisses only when he knows it won’t be expected—on fire escapes during dawn pastries, beneath bridges where canal water laps against stone echoes, once in the empty carriage of a train bound nowhere just so he could taste silence between breaths. His desire is quiet, persistent—a slow burn measured in shared glances and margin-doodles of intertwined hands.The city is his collaborator. Utrecht hums beneath his footsteps, offers him secrets in dripping eaves and flickering neon. When heartbreak returns—as it sometimes does—he walks until his boots bleed metaphorical holes into maps no one else can read. But always, eventually, someone hands him tea in a chipped cup on some unnamed stoop, or smiles while reading over their shoulder in the floating nook. And for now, that is enough.