time, passing

Note: I refer obliquely to suicide in this post. Don’t read it if that’s not for you. I also use pseudonyms.

I’M LYING ON A MATTRESS in a room I once knew 26 years ago as the bedroom of my teenage German host brother.

It’s a room in the basement of my host family’s tall, narrow four-storey house, with a glass window stretching across one wall at garden level outside. The storage space beside the stairs has been converted into a guest bathroom, but the flight of wooden stairs remains the same – tight, winding, and vertiginous to climb.

If I close my eyes, I could be 16 again, curled on a different bed pushed into the far corner, whispering to Jürn, perhaps the first boy I ever loved.

It’s the window I remember most forcefully, the window at garden level through which milky mid-winter light would filter into the room.

Maybe there was a desk, a bookcase. Yes, I think there was a bookcase and a cupboard full of boardgames.

Mostly, though, I remember only the window. The bed. The winter light. The first boy I ever loved.

The room seems much bigger now, which is strange. Often, with age, things seem smaller.

It’s a marvel – a miracle – to be here.

I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THE passage of time and all that this word encompasses. Last week I attended a conference in London, where I gave a paper about stylistics, drawing on a handful of examples that demonstrate a certain metalinguistic quality I find myself repeatedly drawn to in fiction.

One was a sentence from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

‘Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance,’ Atwood writes. ‘You have to work at it.’

The ingenuity of this sentence is morphological. Ignoring and ignorance are both nominals or words that can function as nouns. Ignoring, however, is what we call a gerund: a present-participial form of a verb that can sit in other syntactic ‘slots’ and perform other syntactic roles. A present participle pins the verb form down in a continuous or progressive state, denoting ongoing action or effort.

Ignorance, on the other hand, is a nominalisation, a type of noun we form via derivation, by adding suffixes. The process of nominalisation always results in an abstract noun. In this sense, nominalisations convert actions into mere concepts.

So, Atwood was right, is right. Ignoring requires more effort, and she’s encoded this meaning not only at the level of semantics but also at the level of morphology and syntax.

Most readers intuitively understand the subtle difference – the play on words. But this sentence means something more in otherwise more complex ways.

Passage follows a similar pattern. It’s a nominalisation, formed from the verb pass by adding the suffix age – like we do in assemblage and carriage and many other English words of Old French origin.

The so-called passage of time is purely conceptual. The idea of a thing.

It’s different from passing time.

But passing is also strange.

Time can pass. Intransitive verb.

Or we can pass time. Transitive verb. We, the subject, act through the verb on an object: time.

Twenty-six years have passed since I was first here; how have I passed that time?

THERE’S SOMETHING HALLOWED ABOUT THESE occasional opportunities to cross paths again. I feel so fond of my German family and friends, yet what kind of relationship can hang upon a couple of days seized here and there over years and years and years?

When I travelled to Germany as a shy, awkward 16-year-old, I was also deeply unhappy. That year, I’d started a peculiar sort of bargaining that I dabbled in for years and years to come. Do something, get something, achieve something… or disappear. More specifically, when I was in Year 11, I’d made up my mind that if I didn’t secure a scholarship for the exchange to Germany, my life wasn’t worth living, so I would have to end it. The following year, the bargaining centred on my university entrance score: OP1 or death. I don’t say this lightly; I was committed to these courses of action, but I didn’t have a plan. Life, luck, love, God, the universe – something always came through for me, and I survived.

Germany, however, was so joltingly different from home that it felt magical, like a portal to another world. I saw my first snow in Rothenburg, where the exchange group stayed in a hostel that had once been a castle. There were no shower doors in the bathrooms. We girls held up bath towels for one another while each ducked under the cold water to briefly bathe and then swap. One day, we walked up a steep hill to Schloss Neuschwanstein, the palace of Ludwig II on which the Disney logo is based. At Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, we could look in three different directions to three different countries. One way was Switzerland. One way was Austria. One way was Italy.

I found touring lonely and quite exhausting. I wanted to be at home with my Gastfamilie, where my adoptive ‘Oma’, noting how thin I was, begged me to eat her apple pancakes, and my host parents felt like my own. My Gastmutter packed me cheese sandwiches on rye bread for lunch every day, as well as a bottle of fizzy water, which I’d never drunk before and wasn’t sure I liked. In the evenings, I’d play cards on the loungeroom floor with Jürn and his best friend, who was also hosting an exchange student from my hometown. Kate and I became confidantes, gossiping about the group of boys we were hanging out with and their girlfriends or crushes. I sensed that Jürn liked a pretty blonde girl from school, Sabine, or that she liked him, but we never talked about it. Our card games graduated not-so-innocently from President und Arschlock (what we call President and Scum/Asshole in English) to Suck and Blow.

I still clearly remember New Year’s Eve or Sylvester, when people from the neighbour stood out on the dark, slick street drinking sekt and letting off firecrackers. I’d fallen a little bit in love with Jürn, who kissed me while all those lights and sounds ripped through the night sky and we rang in the year 2001. I can’t remember if we were still afraid of the Y2K bug by then, but nothing happened. On New Year’s Day, the streets were quiet once more, littered with debris from the night before.

It’s a difficult thing to explain – because it’s a difficult thing to understand, and the exchange was so short: only six weeks each way – but I felt at the time as though I’d been seen for the first time. Seen as myself. My experience with boys and men before then had been dubious, even dangerous – apart from my best friend, who, to me, felt like the splinter of my soul lodged in another body. Not a boy, man, or other. Just a person. A safe person. Still does.

Jürn was a safe person, too. I think of those snatched, fleeting afternoons curled on the bed below the basement window in the weak winter light, and I still feel safe. So safe.

On the day I left to fly home, I climbed reluctantly onto the tour bus with my fellow exchange students, ready for the journey back to Frankfurt am Main airport. We were stowing our backpacks and settling in our velveteen seats when Jürn ran up the stairs and down the aisle to hug me – like a scene in a movie. We held each other for a minute. And then I whispered in his ear: ‘Go get Sabine.’

JÜRN CAME TO AUSTRALIA SIX months later, deep in our Darling Downs winter, and I felt paralysed by shame, by a dark feeling that billowed through my chest my heart, like a shadow on an x-ray. My family’s house was not beautiful; it was creaky and cold. Cluttered. We travelled an hour each morning to school, me in my brown tartan uniform, Jürn shivering through our windy Toowoomba weather because buildings in Queensland, even at higher altitudes, are so poorly insulated, so haphazardly heated.

One afternoon – I don’t know why – my mother suggested we pick prickly pears from along the front fenceline, overgrown with cacti, and the fine, almost transparent spikes of the fruit pierced the skin of Jürn’s hands, requiring tweezers to remove.

I could have died. I could have died.

I was distant and cold.

This I regret.

JUST THIS MORNING, I SAT at the breakfast table drinking a cup of German drip coffee, my elbow touching Jürn’s. We spread butter on our seeded bread rolls. He passed me a bowl of boiled eggs. I passed him the milk. He explained how to use the salt and pepper shakers. We chatted amiably, like old friends. At the end of the table sat his wife, Sabine, and their three little girls.

My host father was missing from the table. He died four years ago from cancer.

Later, I told Jürn that I haven’t been able to have my own children. I told him about my pregnancy losses, my failed round of IVF, which made me ill and yielded only one or two follicles.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, sadness passing over his amiable face.

‘It’s OK,’ I replied.

I talked about my brother’s three kids, my husband’s two nieces and two nephews, how different and wonderful and difficult they all are, how much I love them. I thought about my husband, who’s so good with children, and my heart sagged.

‘I love babies. I would love to have a baby. But life goes on,’ I said to Jürn.

‘No. I’m sorry,’ he said again.

The children screamed in the background.

ALL THIS TIME HAS PASSED – or I have passed the time – and I understand now why people say that nothing has changed yet everything has changed.

On this visit, everybody looked the same as they did 26 years ago (albeit with a few extra grey hairs and smile lines). But I wonder now, as I sit in my hotel room in Frankfurt, whether I think so because we’ve simply grown or aged at the same time.

Together. So far apart.

Maybe it will always be this way – can only be this way. We could be in the same room or on different sides of the world but always remain mysteriously, inexplicably close. Nothing between us. So much between us. Elbows touching. Oceans apart. Something binding. Something untethered.

I keep thinking of my nanna, who died when she was 101 but said she still felt 17 in her head.

‘What’s the point of this now?’ she used to ask, gesturing at her failing body, her puréed food, the guard rails like prison bars around her hospital bed.

Ageing is cruel, a blessing, some kind of mystery.

I feel consumed by gratitude and full of regret. There are things I never said as a teenager and things I can never now say. I feel them in my body, like delicate prickles beneath the skin, and I wonder if I radiate some kind of desperate energy: grateful and rueful, still 16 going on 17, with the memory of stolen kisses, murmuring in the dark, so much laughter, fluttering eyelashes against cheeks, a snowflake on my tongue.

How lucky I am.

Often, how sad.