Silas lives in a fourth-floor walk-up above the Lombok spice market where the air hums with turmeric and whispered dialect. By day, he illustrates storybooks for forgotten languages—each page layered with hidden symbols only decipherable by touch or scent—but his true art lives in the margins of relationships. He believes love is not declared but *discovered*, like a secret courtyard blooming behind a rusted gate in Utrecht’s oldest alleyways. His sketchbooks are filled with architectural details and half-finished faces of strangers he’s imagined loving. He presses petals from every meaningful night into a leather-bound journal labeled *‘Maps to Places That Never Existed Until You.’*He navigates romance like he does Utrecht’s canals—by feel rather than sight. He leaves hand-drawn maps tucked into library books or pinned beneath cafe napkins that lead lovers to floating reading nooks moored beneath weeping willows, each stop marked by a cocktail he’s crafted to taste like forgiveness, or hesitation, or that moment when laughter dissolves fear. His maps are never direct; they demand wandering, trust in the wrong turn. He believes desire is not a conquest but an excavation—slow and trembling with possibility.Silas struggles against his own precision: trained as both cartographer and illustrator, his mind craves order while his heart longs for chaos. When caught in downpours along Oudegracht bridges or during early-morning train delays at Utrecht Centraal, he finds himself disarmed by strangers who speak in riddles or wear mismatched socks—small acts of rebellion that unspool his discipline. His sexuality unfolds like one of his illustrations: deliberate strokes giving way to wild washes of color when safety is assured. He kisses like someone redrawing borders—careful not to erase what came before.He once closed down De Sterk for three hours after closing time just to recreate his first collision—with her in fisherman's boots spilling bergamot tea across his blueprints. The staff knew to leave the back door unlocked. He lit 37 tea candles (one for each step she took toward him that night) and played Nina Simone on an old record player he’d stolen from his ex’s attic. He didn’t tell her it was love until sunrise painted their shadows into a single silhouette on the wet cobblestones.