In Love With A Homeless Man

Most couples can recall the exact date or location where they met each other. Emmy Abrahamson knows the exact minute.

Emmy was visiting Amsterdam from Vienna in 2006, seated on a park bench while waiting for a friend. At 6:50 p.m., a man approached, sat down beside her and asked for the time. A silly question, she thought, since they were sitting directly in front of a large clock.

First impressions are important, but in this case, Emmy looked past this visibly homeless man’s odor and dirty fingernails and hair.

Her friend was running late, so Emmy passed the time talking with this strange man with “the most beautiful brown eyes I’d ever seen,” and sensed there was something more than met the eye.

When her friend arrived about 10 minutes later, Emmy got up and started to leave. But his next words stopped her, and she remembers them precisely. His exact words were, ‘Saturday, three o’clock, the same bench,’ and he just walked off.

"It just didn’t make sense that somebody visibly homeless could be so confident, because I was single and I dated loads of guys, and they were always like, ‘Yeah, maybe I’ll call you, maybe I won’t,’ and there’s this homeless guy just telling me to be back on this bench."

The man’s name was Vic Kocula, an American who’d been left homeless after running out of money while traveling around Europe and was living, as Emmy put it, “in a bush.” For whatever reason, Emmy couldn’t stop thinking about Vic during the course of the following week. So she decided to meet him at the appointed place and time.

They spent the day together and the sparks continued to fly, but of course, Emmy had to return to Vienna. So before they parted ways, she gave him her phone number in case he wanted to stay in touch. Which, it turned out, he was determined to do. So determined, in fact, that he scrounged up enough money to buy a train ticket. Three weeks later, he traveled to Vie