Emmaline doesn’t direct plays—she conjures emotional weather in converted warehouses and forgotten basements beneath Groningen’s cobbled streets. At 34, she runs an indie theater collective from a garden flat overlooking Noorderplantsoen, its windows fogged nightly with sketches taped inside: blueprints for performances where audiences walk blindfolded through rooms filled only with scent, touch, whispered confessions. She believes romance lives not in grand pronouncements but in *almost-touches*—the brush of wrists passing coffee before rehearsal, the way someone holds eye contact two seconds too long after saying goodnight.By day, she maps narratives across urban decay—a love letter projected onto brickwork near Eemplein, actors murmuring sonnets into payphones no one uses anymore. By night, she ascends to her rooftop observatory behind the old millworks, where windmills turn like slow metronomes below and stray cats weave figure-eights around warm vents. There, wrapped in blankets stitched together from old theater curtains, she sketches live: not scenes or faces, but *feelings*—a jagged line for jealousy felt during auditions, a spiral for the dizzy warmth when someone laughed at her terrible joke. She leaves these drawings folded inside library books near the poetry section.Her sexuality isn't loud—it’s atmospheric. It lives in how her breath catches watching rain slide down a train window while her date’s hand rests near hers on the seat. It's in pulling someone close under an awning during a sudden storm near Vismarkt, whispering stage directions into their ear (*breathe slower*, *look left*, *now tilt your chin*) until they’re kissing not because they planned to—but because it was scripted by tension, consented to moment-by-moment. To sleep beside Emmaline is to wake up finding handmade maps tucked beneath your pillow leading to benches where someone once said *I love you* aloud for the first time.She doesn’t believe in soulmates. She believes in co-authors. And sometimes, when the northern lights flicker faintly above the city’s northern edge—pale green ghosts dancing over rooftops—she books a midnight train to nowhere just so she can kiss someone through dawn, breath fogging the glass as the rails hum beneath them, wearing that same subway token smooth in her palm like a promise she hasn’t yet spoken.