Hiroko lives where sound and stillness collide—in a Jordaan canal loft with floor-to-ceiling windows that catch the golden-hour light like liquid amber. By day, she curates a vinyl listening bar tucked beneath an old print shop, where patrons trade small talk for deep listening, and jazz crackles like breath between conversations. But her true art is the attic speakeasy above it all—accessible only through a ladder hidden behind a rotating bookshelf. There, beneath exposed beams and dangling Edison bulbs, she hosts midnight sound baths and whispered confessions to those who earn the climb. The city’s tight creative circle knows her as elusive, the woman who speaks in album tracks and side-glances, but no one knows she presses a flower from every meaningful night into the pages of a leather-bound journal—each bloom pressed beside live-sketches on napkins from dates that ended too soon, or just right.She doesn’t believe in love at first sight. She believes in *almost*-love—the glance that hesitates on the rain-streaked windowpane, the hand almost brushing yours while reaching for a record sleeve. Her romance philosophy is built on tension held like a needle on vinyl: the moment before the music starts, when you feel its potential humming through your bones. Desire, for Hiroko, is not fire but flood—slow, inevitable, rising until you’re breathless in its depth. She’s learned to trust it only after storms: when canals swell and rooftops glisten, when the city feels too intimate and everyone else seeks shelter—but she steps out anyway.Her sexuality is measured not by touch but threshold—how long can she let someone stay past closing? How many songs will they listen to without speaking? The most intimate thing she’s ever done was play a 1963 Coltrane recording in the dark while tracing a lover’s spine with ink from a fountain pen, sketching constellations only they could feel. She wears monochrome like armor but lets neon slip through—coral scarves, electric-blue linings—tiny rebellions against her own restraint. Her body remembers what her mouth won’t say: the weight of a hand on her lower back during a downpour means more than I love you.She believes in maps more than promises. Her grandest gesture would be a curated scent—bergamot for first encounters, vinyl dust for memory, a drop of rain from the Westertoren roof—for someone who finally learns to read the spaces between her silences.