Notes on the Passage of Time

Jack’s apartment was a womb, and I was born for the first time the moment I left. How does a place become a person? Her bed, her belly? Home, mother. 

Her apartment was built out of the same stone as the high school. I knew it well. I had seen it in the background of old photographs of a bunker in the courtyard, a long-gone relic of the war. It was a concrete-looking stone as gray as the skies in this northern French city, and the buildings shared the same light blue trim. The mortar spread uninterrupted between bricks, bleeding things together. A strange bond for such separate spaces. 

I remember the first time Jack led me and Maeve down the school hallway and through doors I didn’t know you could open, across a courtyard and up the stairs. A liminal space, her bare-bones apartment had the toilet by the front door and the shower down the hall. 

In the months that followed, Jack’s apartment morphed into an extension of the woman who brought us into it. We clung to this site of life as if this building had not existed until we occupied it and would not exist after, becoming only a dissolving memory. 

Jack was the promise of an adulthood that existed outside of reality, a mentor for two sixteen-year-old girls. We clung to her. She was a Melbourne girl, a dumpster diver, six years older than us and infinitely wiser. She was an artist. She knew the touch of men and the love of women. She taught us how to roll cigarettes. When she showed us pictures of her old apartment, all I noticed were the plants. We inhaled her stories of Ketamine trips in Berlin and housesitting in Paris. I looked at her unshaven armpits and the way she cut her own hair and wondered what it was about her that I admired so much. 

And then there was Maeve. The first day I met her I followed her home from school and we ate Belgian waffles in a kitchen that was not hers, smearing Nutella in the creases of our smiles. I laughed when she asked if I was Australian. We smoked cigarettes in the courtyard of the primary school, at the church, under the stairs of someone’s front door with the cold rains of the English Channel seeping through the cracks. 

What Jack saw in me and Maeve I will have to make up. Perhaps she saw the way our faces turned red from laughing as we lay on top of her wooden dining table, hanging our heads backwards over the edge and looking at each other with our hair collapsing around our smiles. Laughing. Blood rushing. Perhaps she saw the girlhood in us, a life force untouched. Perhaps she clung to that innocence in a way I would only understand years later — once I too felt that yearning to return to a younger version of myself. 

All I can say with certainty is that she climbed with us through the shattered window of an abandoned house next to the train tracks, followed us up the stairs to sift through rain-molded French magazines from the seventies. She cut her hair next to us in the bathroom sink as we layered bleach into ours. She taught me how to make a daisy crown two days before I left the country, and then she got on the ferry at Saint Malo, and I never saw her again.

Jack’s bed was a full-size mattress propped up on two wooden palettes she had found in the street. Her windowsill held a collection of found glass and flowers, empty Orangina bottles and a beer can or two. Our friendship was a collection of found girls, united by language in a country that was not yet home. We would perch on the edge of her couch against the second-story window and smoke, tapping ashes onto the street below. We played music out loud and lay on the floor, souls sinking into the wooden boards and emerging refreshed. 

And then there is the night before Maeve left. The image of the three of us lying in bed together resurfaces in my memory like a tide pool unmoving amid receding waves. Hovering at the edge of chaos and transformation, we froze in this last moment of certainty. In that moment, everything existed, solid and true. 

Bodies over and under each other, Maeve’s head in my lap, my fingers absentmindedly braiding strands of hair and letting go. The comforting weight of Jack’s back leaning against my lower legs, the pressure on my shins were a soft kick to my heart. The air filled with music but no words. Our minds yearned to stop time. 

The sun had long set amid the gentle evening rain and the melancholy of the night had settled in. There was an unspoken consensus that, if we lay very still, tomorrow could not come. But we were reluctantly, helplessly watching each other drift out of sight. 

I turned my face to the side, and my tears absorbed silently into the mattress. The words of goodbye have since faded but my tears are still there, in that mattress, in that room, grieving the loss of a great love. Our laughter echoes in the walls, haunting. Part of my soul remains beneath the floorboards, drawing lifeblood from the room, the womb. 

That night as Maeve and I walked home I thought I could kiss her. We were slowly walking up the incline toward her house and singing to each other. On the road there was the glimmer of rain not yet dried. Our shadows danced, two kids guiding each other through an unknown world. 

That night, she slept in my bed, in my clothes, and the sun woke us up through the window, and nothing around us was mine or ours. We were living in a borrowed world, reinventing ourselves every moment. 

I left the place for a couple years, and when I returned, I was shocked by how little had changed. The same gray stone, same mortar, same blue trim. Jack’s old apartment stood stoic as if three girls had not lived and died and been reborn within its walls. As if that room had not been the womb, its tenant our mother. We had overestimated the transience of it all. We thought we would outlive the city, but the only thing fading was ourselves.