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A day and a half with Jil

Stef Hulskamp - 07 januari 2022

Titel A day and a half with Jil I can hear Jil’s voice through the window. 7:30 in the PM. I think about her perfume. I open the door in dress uniform, some 50’s scene this would be! Exciting exciting! (drie witregels) I just spent a week with smelly camouflaged men in a tent Onder de tekst een zwart-wit foto met de onderbenen van mannen in legeruniform, een paar staan, eentje zit.

In my bunk, thinking about Jil while the sleeping pill kicks in. Onder de tekst een zwart-wit foto van een klapbed, met een slaapzak op het bed. Naast het bed staan laarzen en een rugzak. Je ziet de binnenwanden van een tent, met ventilatiegaten.

Jil’s been in my house for a few hours. She’s cooked now. 7:45. Stew, or soup. Not sure what’s the difference. Vegetable broth and her perfume. Mmmm. We finish and talktalktalk. About the army and all the things that are new!- in our lives we absolutely have to share! We ate now. Brushing our teeth – decide to move the excitement to a café. First we change. We look good together. Beige jeans, both of us. White shirt me, black shirt her. 9:00 - The white shirt orders white wine and the black shirt red wine which looks black if I squint my eyes and fits the scene. Clothes make a scene Clothes make a life We talk about Jil’s love life. She wants to hear about the scan’s results. There’s nothing to say. I want to dislike her almost boyfriend. Being hypocritically jealous as I always am with every woman who I ever kissed or slept with and we’re still all great friends and I don’t want anything from them and falling in love with twenty people a week and having so much affection and always hypocritically jealous. A man who looks exactly like Robert De Niro sits down next to us on our 2 person table. We scoot over. No English no English! ‘ OK OK ‘ Bulgaria! The guy pushes his thumb in his chest. Wodka good good. And he’s right, why not? It makes sense. 10:10 PPPPPM forgot camera. Walk in a photographable street. Us being perfectly photographable too. IMAGE: French looking buildings one blue restaurant, or café? -can’t see. Dim lights – trees trees beginning of fall. Car engine, slowly. Jil looks very tall. Eyes closed smiling. 10:16 Café’s closed. Both sleepy. Actually I think Jil pretends to be sleepy too because she knows I’m a weak old man now since the sickness who goes to bed early with his books. 3:20 AM awake in pain. (My thumb’s broken and my nail is hanging on a loose edge) Sleep again Jil gets up at 8. I stay in the bed for 40 minutes longer. 8:42 Get up the way I learned in the army, immediately broom the house, do the dishes not thinking while doing this, full-auto. Putting on the left running shoe my brain switches ON. Look at Jil - feel a bit ashamed that Jil might think that all that looked a bit pyscho.

Fast forward to noon and we’re sitting in some café. Coffee coffee. The coffeejar at the house is empty. Jil slept bad, she says. We talk about girls. Onder de tekst een zwart-wit foto waarop een jonge vrouw een latte drinkt. Er ligt een pakje sigaretten, een bril en servies op tafel. De foto is van bovenaf genomen. Onder de foto staat: We smoke obviously. It fits it fits!

12:38 Jil pays. Jil says she’s in love with a chair. Onder de tekst een zwart-wit foto van stoelen in een café. Onder de foto staat: The chair’s yellow.

Tekst in pagina 6 They sell books. She buys one. Sartre. I discovered Sartre and Camus in a hospital bed around the same time. I hated Sartre; he made everything so depressing. Camus made me almost die laughing. He told me it didn’t matter. It was all just for kicks. I’d had a lot of kicks. We walk to art school. Not so far away. There we meet Djalil. Some guy who’s been staying at my house for a few weeks. Djalil sees me. I see him. His eyes burn burn HE YELLS AT ME TO GET ON THE FLOOR. I can choose between 25 push-ups or counting to 25 with him on my back. Here’s why: We quit smoking. This is the punishment. Obviously with Jil I smoked because it so fit the scene! Jil doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t find anything strange. The price you pay! Smoking has been a big part of my life. I think I romanticize it. Also all my memories are smoking since 11 years old, which is basically every reliable memory. But this is a much-repeated story and I’m not here to talk about smoking. Only about Jil. Now this other guy walks past. So many human beings! He hands me a giftcard for a book. Naast de tekst staat een zwart-wit foto van Djalil die op de rug zit van Stef terwijl hij plankt.

Tekst op pagina 7 14:30 McDonalds bench. Sharing a cigarette. ‘The worst part of my day is telling my roommate I smoked’, Jil says. Wondering what it says about our personalities that I immediately think this is a stupid thought since she could just lie. Jil looks at all the people with her wonderful way of sitting and pupils dilating! She says it’s funny that if you look at a single individual in a crowd long enough it starts looking absurd. A woman walking with a bike between other people. Her legs are carrying her. She’s holding on to the bike. Looks like it’s trying to stop her own legs from going forward. Ah. All people here decided what to wear, she says. This girl in the blue sweater decided to put on light blue jeans, golden earrings and her fantastic sunglasses. 14:40 She walks past - I melt, forgetting to ask if I can make a picture – don’t worry it’s for art school for art school ! Ah – . At least she smiled. The cigarette end gets crushed under Jil’s foot. We go into some bookstore with my newly acquired giftcard. Jil says she can never keep standing in bookstores, sits down. We spend 20 minutes looking at little kids discussing kids’ books, buy nothing. Go home. Onder de tekst staat een foto van iemands benen, in lichte wijde denim met birkenstocks aan.

15:20 Almost out of film. 15:26 enter a drugstore. I get a roll of film. Jil knows I’m out of coffee - buys coffeebeans. Een foto van in plastic verpakte blikken, gestapeld. Onder de foto staat: Not coffeebeans

15:40 OH! Jil says, I’m going to eat an orange! !! at 16:39 -back in the house- She’s peeled the orange, I made her coffee. I look at her orange -at her. Her orange again, ORANGE. The colour is so so bright. We’re actually doing work. I’m writing this, she does whatever she does. I’m not sure. It’s strange what a person’s presence can do for productivity. I don’t do anything by myself. But with some people, mostly women. Even if they are in the room next to me. I work work work and get all excited for life. 18:?? Enough of the work. Time to go outside again and eat somewhere and impress Jil by my choice of where to eat and what. Jil’s at the bottom of the stairs, door open in the street.wind wind wind strange wind, looks hard, feels soft. ‘the wind looks fake’ ‘yes’ We laugh. Need to take Jil for dinner somewhere nice. can’t think of anything nice. We walk a bit and I pretend we’re going somewhere while hoping to pass something that’s terribly cozy. While typing this I realise that from now I stop looking at the time. Nearing the station. Nearing anticlimax. No! – I remember there’s a small place across from the station where I could take Jil. Jil looks skeptical. There’s a homeless woman at the gate of the little park that’s also a dining area. Maybe this is how Jil imagines how I was when I was homeless. We didn’t know each other then. I look at her if maybe I can see she’s thinking about me being homeless. Jil’s eyes look a bit sparkling. Nothing but smiles smiles. I think not. Anyway I’m not homeless anymore, I’m about to have dinner with Jil. wait wait wait.

yes. Ah. !! There’s no one. The homeless woman has walked away. We’re the only people. The park has a massive tent under which are about 20 tables and 40 chairs. All empty. The tent’s dark and anticipating the coming winter depression I move two of the chairs, Jil a table, outside of the tent. We make our own place. I like this most in life; with some people you’re really in on it together. Creating the scene without words but both knowing perfectly well the style and feeling that’s aimed for. After 15 minutes Jil says she thinks we need to go in to order. We do, we do! Inside we can’t decide whether the woman(30?) is terribly bored, friendly or unfriendly. Weird vibes, Jil tells me whispering. She orders a salad, with goat cheese. I say something too but forgetting what it is on the way back outside. She’ll call us when it’s ready. We can already have the wine. OK! With our wines and the last bit of not sun but pretend sun Jil shows me this card game which bores the hell out of me. Onder tekst is een zwart wit foto, een houten buiten tafel, waarop kaarten, wijn, portemonnee, mobiel liggen.

Movies and spoken language really shape a certain narrative in a life, Jil says. She’s been an international student for four years now, has only spoken English. Has only spoken English with me. She says that in her language - which sounds made-up - Luxembourgish, she would only use one expression for I like you as well as I love you. Ech hunn dech gar

The thing is, she continues while I realise I really need an audiorecorder, because I use English and learn the Hollywood fear for the word love, even in my language I started using the word appreciate. To me appreciation sounds very dull. She tells me she appreciates the guy she’s dating. Martin. Fuck Martin. Finishing the dinner we bring the plates back. The woman looks like she hasn’t moved. After paying and thank you thank you we move out the door and move towards the station. Move move but slowly move. What I would tell other people was a normal pace but is actually slower than a normal pace. This is nice.

We split a last cigarette. Jil leaves. Een grauwe kleuren foto, van station Arnhem Centraal in de avond.

Stef Hulskamp (1995, hij/hem) maakt fotoseries, soms met tekst soms zonder foto's.

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