Jes moves through Utrecht like a pulse in its veins—cycling down cobblestone alleys before dawn, weaving through Lombok market stalls with a thermos of spiced chai, dodging delivery scooters with the grace of someone who's learned to trust motion over stillness. By day, he writes sharp, lyrical editorials for *Stadslucht*, advocating for car-free zones and equitable mobility, his words sharp enough to cut through bureaucracy but softened by a poet’s eye for detail. But by midnight, when the canals go still and the city hums beneath streetlights, Jes becomes something else: a composer of lullabies for lovers who can’t sleep. He records them on an old tape machine in his floating reading nook—a repurposed houseboat cabin moored behind the Botanical Bridge—each melody stitched from field recordings of tram bells, rain on zinc roofs, and whispered confessions.He doesn’t believe in love at first sight, but in *almost-touches*—the brush of a sleeve on a packed tram, the way someone holds their breath when passing under a tunnel of chestnut trees in bloom. His romance philosophy is built on rhythm: the sync of footsteps on wet pavement, the shared inhale before a risky kiss. He’s fallen once before—hard—for someone who vanished after a summer of sunrise pastries and handwritten bike maps, leaving only a burnt-out mixtape and the fear that intimacy is just borrowed time.His sexuality lives in thresholds—rain-slicked fire escapes where he’s kissed lovers between thunderclaps, hidden bars where he’s fed strawberries dipped in honeyed rum to strangers-turned-confidants, subway rides where fingertips traced promises along palm lines. He doesn’t rush; consent for him is choreography—eyes held before lips meet, a hand paused at the small of a back until it’s welcomed. He makes love like he writes: with precision and overflow.What undoes him is softness—someone laughing too loud at his terrible jokes, the smell of toasted cumin on skin, another person’s lullaby humming back at him in the dark. He cooks midnight meals that taste like childhood Sundays: *stamppot* with buttered onions, *poffertjes* dusted with cinnamon like snowfall. He once turned an abandoned billboard near Vaartsche Rijn into a two-line poem for an almost-lover: *You are the quiet between sirens / I never want to be found.* He still cycles past it every Thursday.