In June we moved back to the Netherlands, six suitcases across 8000 kilometres, and after a brief spell at my parents’ place, we moved into our own home. This second move also involved putting down carpet, curtains, buying appliances and furniture — so that our new garage quickly filled with cardboard boxes and other packaging material.

With most of it, I rode to the waste paper point, a blue cargo container on the edge of our town, overlooking the floodplains of the IJssel river. And to throw away cardboard, you have to climb steps to reach the top edge of the container, and then throw everything inside. Standing there, I saw — a few hundred meters away — our town’s graveyard, a place I slowly remembered I had reasons to go to.

I’m taken back to a Saturday morning in 2003. I was 14 years old and delivered magazines in our neighbourhood, and after one round I came home to find my dad and our neighbour, sitting in the living room. I don’t know which of the two said it, but our neighbour’s neighbour’s boy had an accident; he was hit by a train. And in my teenage brain that sentence slowly processed, weighing up what it meant, and a question formed in my head: “Is he hurt? Is he in hospital?”, but I don’t think I actually asked it. Nobody wanted to say the words, but my dad and the neighbour spoke more, and it was clear to me that our neighbour’s neighbour’s boy had died.

I write boy, but he was the seventeen-year-old who we all looked up to. We were all boys, kids — but he was on the cusp of being a man — taller, stronger, cooler than us, always in white sporting clothes, black shades and headphones attached to his MP3 player.

He had seen or done things we hadn’t and couldn’t even guess about — he could buy things we couldn’t. We only knew that we were somewhere in the middle of becoming — adolescence, a word we didn’t have yet, but we felt it.

That was 2003, and I’ve thought about him so many times. It was not only my first encounter with unnatural death, not someone dying in their old age, but before life had truly and well begun. He had seen or done things we had not, could buy things we could not. We didn’t know all those details, but we did know of our own adolescence — even if we didn’t know that word, we felt it.

That was 2003. We weren’t even close, but I’ve thought about him so many times, as it was my first encounter with unnatural death — not someone dying in their old age.

Some days after that Saturday, we went to the ceremony at the crematorium, among a huge audience. Yet we weren’t close family, so after the ceremony we shook hands with the direct family, felt sorry for their loss, and went home. I never saw where he was put — although I did know, always knew, the location.

I came down from the waste paper container and walked over. I went through the gates and figured I could just walk in and find him. Were graves ordered per year? Are the urns all together? But I soon discovered the graveyard was far too big for that, so I went back to the board at the entrance, found him and figured how to walk, but still I got lost in the lines and rows and plots. I went back to the board to look again. And each time I went into the graveyard I felt heavier in my heart, because I would meet him again, I realized that his family must have walked this same path twenty-three years ago and said goodbye to him.

I found his tombstone, inscribed “Love never dies”, and followed the letters with my finger. I told him he hasn’t been forgotten. But I also thought about that Friday. He crossed an unmanned train crossing with his sunglasses on, loud music on his headphones — did not see the lights flashing, did not hear the sirens, and did not see the train. They put barriers on the crossing a month later. Yet that one moment affected all those years and reaches still all the way to here.

And I stand on the gravel lane in this graveyard and I feel the movement of time. Since 2003, I’ve moved out of our street, I’ve moved to Rotterdam, Haarlem, Amsterdam, eager to get out of the country, to Sydney, and to Shanghai. The hundreds of places I’ve seen and thousands of people I’ve met. And as I walk back to the gate, a fourth and final time, I’ve never felt the weight of time as clearly as this.