Lovers who Uncover

“Where do all the lovers meet with one another, In an effort to uncover what has happened to the silent days? Despite ones on the corner, dream of something warmer A semblance of our old ways, what has happened to our handmade days? … And won't you show us where your heart is?” Crystal Castles - Lovers Who Uncover Has the following ever happened to you? To be fast asleep and suddenly dream that you are stumbling or falling, which causes an unpleasant and instant rush of adrenalin that makes you move your feet and wake up, startled and with a sensation of emptiness in your stomach. Or when you are walking upstairs in the dark, raise your foot in order to reach the next step, but there is none, and your foot inevitably falls into emptiness. Have you ever experienced something like that? Alright, then now try to multiply that feeling by a thousand and make it last way longer than just a moment... Can you imagine what that would feel like? Yes? Well, then you know how Antonio was feeling right now. It was hard to tell exactly what Antonio remembered or which things he had willingly suppressed, but he did still remember, as if it were in slow motion, the moment he had been tackled by the police... but, strangely enough, without any sound. He saw nothing but slow images of him being dragged away by force by one of the officers... saw Lovino still lying on the ground with a red puddle slowly growing bigger and bigger under his body... saw his eyes, devoid of any shine, and begged them to let him touch the Italian. He didn't want to leave him alone, not after having promised him to never let him go. And even though he also remembered moving his mouth, everything stayed a silent movie. In his memory, he saw one of the policemen bringing his hand to Lovino's neck and then shaking his head, looking angry... What did that gesture mean?... Everything turned more and more gray and silent until Antonio’s head stopped processing what was happening at all. Antonio then fell into a catatonic state. Tears were flowing out of his eyes without ever stopping, but his face held no expression at all, his body wasn't moving, and his mind was empty. In between his memory lapses, he managed to see a prison cell and an interrogation room. Murmurs coming from afar, his eyes shedding tears without any end in sight, and the rest of his being impassive... it felt good to not be able to think and feel anything besides that sensation of endlessly falling. If he could just stay inside that emptiness and not face reality, then he was fine with it. A world where Lovino didn't exist anymore, wasn't worth being in. Thus, he stayed in that almost vegetative state. Despite the interrogations, despite spending the night in a dirty cell where the others present were trying to intimidate him, despite his mother and father arriving and hugging him, sick with worry... there wasn't anything left inside of him. He wasn't speaking, eating, thinking nor feeling. He didn't care about his lawyer's lecture nor answered any of the questions directed at him. The only time he spoke was when he asked for Lovino. "Where's Lovi?" he uttered with a hoarse and monotone voice, staring at the metallic handcuffs around his wrists... no one answered him. They all looked at each other, changed the topic, and finally sent him back into his cell at the police station due to his lack of cooperation. While walking through the hallway, accompanied by the police, he spotted a person from afar. A trace of life entered his eyes once he noticed that said person had brown hair with a protruding curl and was approaching him. Antonio gave a little jump. There he was! No... that guy wasn't Lovino. A young man, who looked very similar to the Italian, was walking, accompanied by two adults, who seemed to be his parents. He was moving listlessly and with his head down, having the same absent look in his eyes as Antonio. However, there was still something different about him: he seemed as if a part of him had died. The Spaniard walked past him. They looked at each other, but didn't say nor do anything... then Antonio returned to his catatonic state and isolated himself from the world, locked inside the nothingness reigning in his head. Perhaps, there had been a trial, he didn't really remember… and a sentence, that he understood from hearing his mother cry. Constantly hearing phrases like “everything’s going to be alright” and these things that lose their meaning as soon as they are pronounced out loud. Nothing was and could ever be alright, but he couldn't care less. Was he in jail? Yes, indeed, he was, and could confidently say that his time there was perhaps his second-worst experience in life, even though he only remembered it vaguely. He wasn't able to recall the images, but the sensations. His drug addiction started to create havoc: when the shock and commotion were gone, they were replaced by an abstinence syndrome. He trembled and shuddered all the time, felt nauseous day and night, had much too vivid nightmares every time he managed to fall asleep, and suffered from the most intense physical pain he had ever experienced in his life. Like sharp knives burying themselves into his entire body and constantly turning around inside his flesh… but that still wasn't the worst. Procuring drugs in jail was easier than one could imagine, however, his mind and body started fighting each other whenever he tried to get some relief; he did get the drugs, but was unable to consume them, for every time he was getting ready to inhale or inject some, he remembered Lovino so clearly that it made him vomit out what little he had inside his stomach and cry until passing out from exhaustion and pain. His biggest wish was to die. He was plagued by insomnia, which made it impossible to neither sleep nor dream, could barely eat, and spending his days on a dirty cot was the closest thing he had to something that resembled comfort... he missed not being able to feel anything, and despite the constant visits of his parents and their support, nothing could ever get him out of his terrible physical state and even less his mental one. There were nights when he managed to make his head stop thinking, and just lay there, curled up into a ball, staring into nothingness and hugging himself, feeling how thin his body had become, and listening to the other inmates fight and do other things. They had lost all interest in him once they had noticed that he was nothing but a breathing body. Those nights were more or less pleasant, because he could immerse himself into an nonexistant place in his mind and be granted some relief. Two months later and after a gigantic sum of money paid by his parents to lawyers and bribes thanks to a negligent judicial system, Antonio was finally freed for good conduct and due to lack of evidence. Proof had only been found for one of the several robberies he had committed, but in order to get his freedom, it had been decided to send him to rehabilitation. If he didn't accept, he would be sent back to jail. It didn't make him happy at all, for him it was nothing but the same days, but in a different scenery. The pain from the abstinence was as terrible as ever, but the memories... those weren't any easier to endure than the physical symptoms... What if he asked everyone to just kill him? Then everything would be a lot easier to bear. But no, instead he ended up in another prison, only a more decent one... where the sensation of falling became even stronger. He had noticed that no one was talking about Lovino nor ever mentioned his name, as if he had never existed neither in his life nor in the world... Where was Lovino? Why wasn’t he still getting any answer? And he listened to the long group therapy sessions in silence, merely looking at the ones who were talking to him, kept throwing away his food, pretending to have eaten it, and forced himself to not sleep at night, because he was afraid of dreaming... he was dying more and more each day. Until he was visited by someone he had truly not expected to see, not after everything that had happened. He saw Francis and Gilbert cross the rehabilitation center's doorshed and didn't know what to say to them. His mouth had forgotten how to speak and how to pronounce things that sounded even slightly human. They looked at each other, and he could sense all the different emotions inside his friends, while the Spaniard himself, who didn't remember how to feel, didn't show any expression. Gilbert was the first one to run up to him and wrap him into a hug... oh... right... that was how human warmth felt like. Those were Antonio's thoughts as he was squeezed by the albino, who was whispering apologies to him. Why was he apologizing? The Spaniard didn't understand. There was suffering in Gilbert's proud red eyes, an expression that looked extremely out of place on his always arrogant face. Antonio would have liked to tell him that he seemed like a different person now, but he still couldn't remember how to talk. And even less, how to hug someone back. Next came Francis, who also squeezed him extremely tightly, whispering one apology after the next... And Antonio still didn't understand why they were sorry. Having given him another squeeze that wasn't reacted to and still continuing to touch Antonio, the Frenchman looked him directly into the eyes with his blue ones that seemed to decipher everything going on inside the Spaniard. "I'm very sorry for what happened to Lovino," Francis said, being the first person to pronounce that name since the incident. "Lovino?" Antonio repeated, his voice finally reviving. Francis nodded. "Yes, I heard about it, and you have my sincere sympathy." Antonio found himself in that eternal emptiness; he was falling and falling, but his fall that had seemed so endless before, was finally reaching its end. "Lovino..." he uttered again... yes, the fall had ended. His bones all shattered at the same time and everything broke inside of him as his body violently hit the ground, the bottom of that ravine he had been letting himself fall into quite some time ago... now, having arrived at its lowest point and with his entire being destroyed, an agonized scream, accompanied by loud crying resounded in the entire hall and could be heard even outside the rehabilitation center. Antonio slumped to the ground, bitterly crying. Francis managed to catch him, and the Spaniard clung to him, still screaming and wailing. "Lovino! I couldn't save him... Francis, I... I let go of him," he sobbed at the top of his lungs, while being hugged by Francis, who had to get on his knees due to his friend's weight. Gilbert approached them. "What should I do without him?!" Antonio yelled, without bothering to wipe away his tears. "What am I supposed to do without him?! I have no clue! What should I do to stop all this?!" "Live!" Francis exclaimed, making the Spaniard raise his teary and reddened face. "Live, Antonio, this is what you'll do. Wasn't this what the two of you were looking for? Then live for his sake as well. If you couldn't save him, then at least save yourself and find what both of you were wishing for so much." Gilbert, in the meantime, took the Spaniard's hand. Antonio got silent and just continued crying as if he never intended to stop. If Lovino was watching over him right now, having turned into a star that was mocking the mortals, would he laugh about Antonio if the latter should listen to Francis?... He remembered, the Spaniard remembered how much he had wanted to live and he also recalled Lovino and wanted to live for him or at least for his memory. Because continuing to be alive would be the proof that everything had been real. And he wished to live in order to keep loving him. He didn't want that love to stop. Perhaps, the most frightening thing after having been that close to death and having witnessed it yourself wasn't necessarily the fear of disappearing... no, it was having to face life again, everything it represented, its hurdles, and the indecipherable path presenting itself before your eyes, the consequences of your actions... We are afraid of the unknown, afraid of the things we cannot control, of the emotions that are perhaps more than we could take, of having to face all of that all alone. Of not being strong or brave enough to continue on our own. Antonio was more than scared, terrified even, but he still took that risk... and there he was now, sitting in that room with a gray tobacco cloud floating over his head and surrounded by strangers who shared stories of their lives. He was smoking as well and briefly remembered Lovino's anecdotes about group therapy. Antonio smiled a bit as he found himself with a cigarette in his hand and being one of those people, who soothed their anxiety with nicotine, trying to find a placebo for what they had been consuming day by day. "Antonio, I am happy that you have finally decided to participate as well," said the therapist, watching the Spaniard avidly smoke his cigarette. The latter gave a little smile and nodded. "Alright, then let's hear your story, Antonio. Everybody here has a story that has brought them to this place. Which is yours?"  The man placed his notebook on his lap, crossed his legs and arranged his glasses, directing his attention at the Spaniard, who smiled nervously again and looked at the other people, whose gazes were on him as well.  Antonio took another drag from his cigarette and exhaled the smoke through his nose. He would have liked to say something sarcastic, just as Feliks used to in moments like these, but then decided to tell the truth. "I don't have any story," he said with something similar to shyness, and the therapist arched an eyebrow and arranged his glasses once more, as if it were a kind of tic.  But before he could say anything, Antonio continued. "People believe, and even used to think that way, that you need a sad past or a good reason to get to such a point; for someone it's loneliness, the demons they carry inside, their past, life itself, or simply the circumstances they were born into... but I'd say that you don't always need a tragedy. Sometimes it's just enough to wake up one morning and feel empty inside." He wasn't looking at anyone in particular, but at the window, almost being able to visualize Lovino, leaning against it, smoking and listening to him with his eternal frown. "The real question here is: What will you use to fill said emptiness?" Antonio continued, and tenderness appeared in his gaze. "And I decided to fill it with love." Now, he could see Lovino grin mockingly at him while still smoking his cigarette. Love stories don't always end like a fairytale, no. Love is something more than just people being happy and couples kissing and giving each other promises... just as life is something more than merely smiles or pain. Antonio learned to see the different nuances of life, stopped to go from one extreme to the next, and concentrated on seeing better, on noticing what couldn't be seen with your eyes, what was lying beyond the horizon... Life is an incomprehensible mystery, not just a collection of mass-produced happiness, not just the monochrome photography of black, gray and white hues, but perhaps an amorphous mixture of what destiny wants for us, of what we want for ourselves, of what cannot be described, of coincidences, of all the feelings and experiences we take mental pictures of and store them in an album of moments... life is more than what we think it is. It was a day in late autumn. The wind was blowing, the trees letting orange leaves fall from their skeletal branches and pile up on the ground, forming bronze-colored little paths. Some of those leaves turned into blankets that covered the graves at a cemetery. One of the graves had a tombstone lacking an epitaph, but carrying the name of Lovino Vargas and the dates of his birth and death on it. Contrary to the pure white bouquets on the graves nearby, Antonio was holding flowers of different colors and squatted down in front of the tombstone. What should be the first thing for him to tell Lovino about? He didn't want to inform him that the old apartment building where the Italian's grandpa had lived and where the two of them had spent so many nights had been demolished not too long ago, and neither that Ivan had disappeared without a trace after some strange incident, according to the rumors he had heard, and also neither that Feliks' home was now occupied by a happy and pretty normal family, completely different from that extravagant guy. No, and neither about jail nor his rehab. He would tell him only one thing. "Hello," he greeted, stroking the letters of the name belonging to the person he had loved so much and continued to love as intensely as on the first day. "Hey Lovi, a lot of things have happened, right?... And keep happening, to be honest. Sometimes I feel lonely because I cannot talk to you. Remember all the times we talked until late in the night? Yeah, me too, but now I'm trying to sleep at night, at least a bit. Neither Fran nor Gilbo are angry at me, they're even helping me look for your brother, because I want to tell him about all the things we experienced together. The good things, obviously, like about all the towns we saw and those times we went out to dance, our road trips, and even about that one time we got lost and landed on a dirt road, only managing to find a way out the next day... fun things." He giggled and sat down on the ground, crossing his legs. “I miss you so much, Lovi, more than you could ever imagine.” His voice broke, and a rebellious tear appeared at the corner of his eye, but he wiped it away just in time to put on a big smile. His face was glowing, his green eyes shining with their unique emerald tone, and he looked happy. It was a happiness the mirror had never shown him, as real as the love story the two of them shared. “Lovino, I came to tell you one thing,” he continued, letting out a warm laugh that resounded through the silent cemetery and would have been able to infect the tombs’ residents. Antonio stroked the tombstone once more, and his smile widened. “I am alive,” he said and laughed again. Then he kissed the flower bouquet, placed it on the grave, looked at the sky and also sent a kiss there. Covering himself better with his coat, he got up, shook the dust from his clothes and left. This was day number 365 of Antonio Fernández Carriedo’s supposed new life, and at the same time the first day of his way up, leaving the bottom of the abyss.