Sitting at the toilet I look at the beige, thin, unpolished square that’s connected to the wall. It’s a light switch. The color palette of the plastic button and it’s surrounding tiles reminds me of the bathrooms in my grandmas old home. It makes me wonder how old it is. Probably older than the girl I drank coffee with this morning, at a french bakery on the nieuwendijk, who after I told her that her the emotional hardship she was facing to me seemed quite rough, and she had all the right to be displeased, told me “yes but it is also part of the grown up world”. I think that despite her being very capable of rationally analyzing other peoples emotions and actions, she should not have to be all that grown up yet.
We try to figure out who the secret source of a comment made about her is. “She said that man has a son my age, that’s the only clue we have, but according to her you are also my age, and that isn’t exactly true”. We are six years apart, which is relatively a lot if you consider that one of us is under twenty, but then I think of the light switch and how it’s probably older than both of us.
On that scale, we are simply two girls that both entered this world after the light switch was installed.
“Why is your dentist all the way down south?”
We have been going to this office as a family ever since we had to go to one. My father knows the dentist that used to run this clinic, but he got ill, and over time he came to be there less and less. The dental hygienist I’m seeing today, Sophie, has taken biannual looks inside my mouth ever since I was a toddler. She’s seen me on six month intervals for probably over twenty years now. We used to come as a family, my sister, parents and I. I remember every visit as: my father has some cavities, my mother not a single one. My sister needs something scary and painful. (My mother will faint whilst holding her hand during her first root canal treatment, at the age of seven.)
First we’d come by car and be dropped off at our school in Noord later. Later I’d go with my sister as a duo on our bikes. After the appointment, fluor still sticking to our gums, we’d find our way to our high school, five minutes away. Often my mom would join and we’d buy pastries in the french bakery on olympiaplein. Every since I moved to Spain, and tried to go whenever I was in town, I go alone.
On the wall in the corridor downstairs there is a photo collage in which I recognize Sophie. The saturation and sharpness of the prints, as well as the hairstyles worn by the people that figure in them, remind me of the pictures of my parents wedding. This means the pictures predate my existence. If Sophie saw me and my friend having coffee and petit pains this morning, she would probably say we share the same age.
Whilst I’m in the chair, waiting for a dentist I have never met (“Hi HELLO there Im going to take a look inside YOUR MOUTH if you DONT MIND”) to check a suspicious spot on my last molar, we plan a new appointment.
“June 18th, same time?”. “Yes! Sure!”
I wonder if Sophie feels like a pioneer of time, when she plans the new appointment with each client, asking permission to create a block in their agenda amidst a vast sea of nothingness. The little note “dentist appointment” remaining there, very lonesome, until much later, when other commitments start to populate the pages of the diary. I once had a lecture on frontier ideologies for my English lit. course. I lay still while they take turns poking inside something which may be my first ever cavity, thinking of dentists as pioneers past the slow moving frontier of civilized and wild time in their clients agendas. Civilized and wild being ideological imaginations, needless to say.
June 18th. I’ll be wearing shorts, maybe. No mittens, for sure. Through time, outfits change and frontiers move, my friend and I always six years apart but also a bit more of the same age, and I’ll eat french patisserie and pray for no cavities.
“a pioneer of time” 😍
╰(▔∀▔)╯!!