The long road from my home town to the next. Not winding, just boring. Straight. Small canal on the left, small canal on the right. It’s raining, just another autumn evening, on my way to one of my friends, or is he even? We are all gathering there, the four of us, but am I really going there for him or because of my secret crush on his sister. It doesn’t matter, he is weird and so am I. We all are, in our specific and very deliberate ways; fashionably depressed, collectively nonconformist, artsy in the most common of ways and generally, more alike than any of us would like to admit. It’s raining. In my memory it always rained when I visited him to secretly watch his sister or talk about Prince, Joe Jackson or, God forbid, The Nits. It made him special, to have such a love for such an ordinary Dutch band. No, I must correct myself here, we all had our secret weird crushes, loves that no one understood, and that connected us, from Weather Report to Prince and back again to Ella Fitzgerald, via Tom Waits, The Clash and Joy division. Even U2 had its place, even though we collectively agreed it was fundamentally for girls, music to like because all potential girlfriends did.

Why am I thinking this? Why am I transported back to the late 80s, the time we transitioned from being a group of friends to something that resembles a memory at best. The obvious answer is that he died not too long ago, and that his death transports me back to unrealised potential, choices I never made, opportunities I never pursued. Kinda ironic that I gave him some lyrics once, to be used by his band, for one of their songs, maybe. I wish we would have tried to play it together back then. That is, him playing it on the piano, me singing, or murmuring, in the brightly lit living room, in the house halfway the long road from my home town to the next, secretly eyeing his sister from the corner of my eye…