I have many vague and some sharp memories of my youth, but they are usually not about the milestones. I remember how dizzyingly low the toilet bowl was when I had roller skates on. And I can still see the ants walking through the vanilla custard on the sidewalk in front of our house, where the bottle that the milkman had placed had fallen over. This sounds like I grew up in the fifties, but it was the eighties, in Enschede. I also remember exactly where I stood when I cried over the song ‘If only I could be with you for a moment’ by Gordon, in the early nineties, when I was 16. I stood in the middle of my attic room and looked at the wooden slats on the wall. Gordon sang about his deceased grandmother, I cried about my ex-boyfriend. He was 20, worked in a dry cleaners and was on benefits because he cheated the government. He was still living with his previous girlfriend, with whom he cheated on me. That’s why I broke up with you. I didn’t think it was a problem that he was addicted to heroin. My parents didn’t say anything about that either. My father found it particularly problematic that he had called our young dog an ‘oldie’ and my mother kept repeating that he had asked her if ‘the city was loose’ when he wanted to know if the cafes were open.
When my boyfriend would take me to his dealer, I would sit there in silence on the couch while they chatted and smoked heroin. He didn’t mind that I didn’t say anything. As long as you’re beautiful, he said. Even the two of us had little to talk about. He was good at pinball. He had dyed platinum blond hair and wore tight jeans. That’s why I liked him. When we broke up he sent me a letter expressing his pain. My mother was quite upset about the language errors, but I felt loved. He missed me, like Gordon missed his grandmother. If only I could talk to you for a moment / like we used to sit for hours / oh if only it were like that.
A few months later I fell for a pale goth DJ with straight black-dyed hair who tried to have sex with me in a cemetery, which I declined. When I got chickenpox, he gave me a mixtape called “Lovely Death Feelings.” Your room looks like a sauna, he said. He didn’t say he already had a girlfriend, but I found that out pretty quickly.
A little later I started dating a boy who had been in my eldest sister’s class. When I came back from vacation we took a bath together. After we had looked at the white spots where my bikini had been, he told me that he was back with his ex, a little brash punk who I liked because she always just said what came to her mind, while my thoughts and feelings only came out through the longest possible route, or through Gordon. This friend once laughed and imitated how I never finished my sentences. We walked in front of my house, not far from the lavender bush that I once stood next to as a six-year-old and thought: as happy as I feel now, I have to remember that for later. That is my sharpest memory, by the way, and a milestone, as far as I’m concerned.
