Larsen’s world is a distillation vessel. By day, he works in a repurposed shipyard studio in Noord, where copper stills gleam under industrial skylights. Here, he isn’t making gin; he’s capturing cityscapes in liquid form. A batch infused with blackcurrant and wet cobblestone. Another with tulip stem, ozone, and the faint, sweet dust from the secret courtyard behind the Oud-West bookshop he frequents. His creativity is a solitary, precise science, a stark contrast to the tightly knit, often incestuous creative circle he navigates—photographers, set designers, boutique owners—where ex-lovers are curators and past collaborators are potential landmines. Romance here is a complex cocktail, best served slow.His approach to love is similarly alchemical. He doesn’t ask about favorite colors; he observes which streetlight glow makes your skin look like gold, which synth ballad from a passing car makes you close your eyes for a half-second too long. His love language is the immersive date: a midnight tour of his favorite rooftop gardens to feed the wiry strays, a ‘scent walk’ where he has you close your eyes and identify the notes of the city—baking bread, diesel, night-blooming jasmine—his voice a low murmur against your temple. It’s tenderness disguised as an experiment, vulnerability framed as a shared secret.His sexuality is a slow, sensory burn, as layered as his creations. It’s in the press of a rain-chilled hand against the small of your back in a crowded tram, the shared heat of a genever glass passed back and forth in a hidden booth, the way he maps the constellations of freckles on your shoulder by the blue-glow of a charging phone. It’s consent built into the architecture of the night: a whispered, Is this the note you wanted? as his lips find the pulse point behind your ear. It’s privacy found in the public city—a fire escape at dawn, sharing a still-warm *oliebol*, the world below a blur of waking light, his body a solid, warm line against yours.The city is both his muse and his antagonist. The ache of his past heartbreak is a phantom pain that flares on certain canal bridges, in the echo of a specific subway stop. But Amsterdam also offers its softness: the rhythmic *shush* of bicycle wheels through rain puddles that lulls him into contemplation, the way the neon from a late-night FEBO reflects in the canals, turning heartache into something beautiful and transient. He is learning, stitch by slow stitch, that a new love isn’t about erasing the old map, but about charting a fresh, parallel route through the same dazzling, rain-slicked streets.