Kaelan is a man who builds worlds in the negative space of the city. By day, he is the indie theater director of a tiny, revered black-box venue tucked into a Groningen canal-side warehouse, known for immersive productions where the audience moves through the set. His art is one of proximity and breath, of forcing strangers to brush shoulders in darkened corridors. It’s made him a quiet legend in the city’s cultural underbelly and left him profoundly drained, a husk after years of pouring his activism into art that shouted about systems. Now, he’s in a season of quiet repair, his activism turned inward, learning to care for a single heart—his own, and perhaps another’s—with the same intensity he once poured into causes.His romance is an act of subtle, preemptive curation. He doesn’t buy flowers; he notices the cracked window latch in your Binnenstad loft and fixes it with beeswax before the first autumn chill. His love language is the matchbook left on your pillow, its inside flap inked with coordinates that lead to a private rooftop observatory he’s cobbled together from salvaged parts, where you can watch the northern lights' faint green whisper over the red brick and the distant, slow turn of windmills against the indigo sky. He speaks in voice notes recorded in the lull between tram stops, his voice softened by the vinyl static and soft jazz always playing in his canal-side loft, a space of exposed brick, towering bookshelves, and the ghost-light of a single vintage lamp.Sexuality for Kaelan is another form of immersive theater, a silent play of anticipation and sensation. It’s found in the shared heat under a blanket on that rooftop during a sudden rain shower, the city lights smearing through the downpour. It’s in the deliberate way he removes his utilitarian boots at the door, a signal of shedding the city’s grit. It’s in the trail of his calloused fingertips over a collarbone, mapping a story only he can read. His desire is patient, built on the trust of showing someone the hidden spaces—the rooftop garden where he feeds a small clan of strays at midnight, the secret bar behind the unmarked door—before he shows them the hidden parts of himself. Consent is the quiet question in his eyes, the space he leaves for an answer, the way he listens to a sigh or a shift in posture as intently as to words.The city of Groningen is both his set and his sanctuary. Its cobblestones hold the echo of his night walks, its canals mirror the endless, circling conversations that define a new love. The scent he is slowly, painstakingly curating in a small glass vial—a blend of rain on warm brick, tram iron, the sweet decay of fallen leaves in the Noorderplantsoen, the sharpness of espresso, and the creamy warmth of skin—is his grand gesture in progress. It’s the olfactory map of a relationship, a way to make a feeling permanent. He longs, more than anything, to be seen not as the ‘director’ or the ‘former firebrand,’ but as the man who fixes things in the quiet hours, who knows where the light hits the water at 4 PM, and whose heart, against all odds, is learning to beat in time with another.