The last time I saw Thijs was about two weeks before Queen’s Day. He was sitting on a park bench with four of his friends and his arm was around the boy at his side. I took a picture. He’s smiling broadly in that photo. It’s a big, satisfying smile that goes perfectly with the slightly mischievous twinkle in his eye. He was wearing wide-legged trousers and holding a glass of wine and a cigarette in his free hand. I posted the photo on Facebook. One of them answered: ‘Have broad legs, do you go to Hajj? TRUE?’
My first memories of him hover somewhere in Salou, fresh out of high school, red-headed in the Spanish sun, bursting into laughter. My last photo is that one. Somewhere in the meantime we became friends. We weren’t very good friends, but the kind of friend you become when you have a lot of mutual friends and you run into each other all the time. The kind of friend that makes you a little easier in your mid-twenties, when you don’t want or need to differentiate between friends, acquaintances, and acquaintances. Because time is infinite and everything is one big party and the more lives the better. You don’t actually know each other, but you do know well enough to come to each other’s funeral.
After his studies, Thijs started living with a good friend of mine. In the years that followed, I got to know him as warm, cheerful, generous, and warm. And crazy. He had a constant desire to set up a stroboscope in his bedroom during one of the countless house parties he gave (whether or not with his housemate’s knowledge), with a big speaker next to him that would play the sound of children’s laughter non-stop. . He was closing the bedroom door. Anyone who goes to the bathroom walks through that door and wonders what the hell is going on in there. I can still see the beaming face he told me this to. It never happened.
I can’t say I miss him. I didn’t know him well enough for that and our lives weren’t intertwined enough. And I would say our friendship has developed into a true friendship. Most likely, we have lost each other over the past twelve years, since I have lost almost all the friends who ever made us friends. But that’s just a shame. On May 1, the day after the Queen’s birthday, my phone rang late in the morning. And that I was standing at the entrance to my living room. On the other end of the line, a friend’s voice sounded. and that she was told that Theis had fallen out of the window that night. And it was it. And this is not used to it.
