My childhood friend M.’s only child has gone to college and since last week has been living in a Groningen kitchen drawer for a scandalous sum. As the photos show, the boy is having the time of his life, but his father is having a hard time with it. Tuesday I visited Mr. Sip, he showed me his son’s old room. The bed was gone, there was only a small desk and a plastic crate with some Lego, swimming certificates, a hoodie and some Men’s Healthmagazines in it.
“Oh, Bertje, he forgot to bring that along,” said M., and picked up a chewed-up piece of plush, of which it was unclear what it should ever have been, from the desk.
“What are you going to do with his room now that he’s gone?”
“Maybe I’ll just leave things as is. To be able to pretend for a while.”
“To be able to pretend what?”
“I do not know. That time doesn’t exist or something.”
“He’s not dead, is he,” I said and dragged him out of the room. Where other people would jump for joy when they have the house to themselves again, M. had a serious post-partum depression within six days.
Downstairs at the kitchen table we made a plan: we would turn his son’s old room into a study, always handy when he came home for a weekend. We cycled to the hardware store for paint and rollers, covered the furniture and started tearing the wallpaper off the wall, which had been there since 2004.
‘Here!” cried M., tearing off strip after strip. “And there!” Well, I thought, as he charged at the wall, at least he could vent. I also understood him, it is also confusing that we live in a world in which one day after another seems to disappear without a trace into nothingness. In which what yesterday was still a white-blond boy with hands like starfish, you now app one photo after another of himself wearing a beer helmet.
M. pulled the wallpaper off the wall harder and harder. He had some color on his nose again. At one point he stopped and looked at me. His eyes glowed. Heaps of wallpaper lay at his feet, as if he had just molted.
“I have to go on,” he said.
“Yup,” I said.
“Certain parts of the past should not be nursed endlessly,” he said, and continued to tear angrily.
Ellen Deckwitz writes an exchange column with Marcel van Roosmalen here.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on August 31, 2023.