Sahil Javed

“I don’t know whether I ever want you to read this, but I know that I need to write it. Because you've been on my mind for too long. I am done with pretending that I’ve erased you from my mind. Some things cannot be erased through silence. Some people have that power over you, whether you like it or not. I begin to see that now. Some people, some events, make you lose your head. They're like guillotines, cutting your life in two, the dead and the alive, the before and after.”

“We hadn't really talked about ‘us’, or what it would be like back in the city, or anything else. There was no ‘us’. Of course, I had thought about it, had wanted to ask: ‘What is this? What are we going to do with it when we get back?’

I remember I only dared ask on the last night, as we lay in the dark of the tent, about to fall asleep after having made love. I asked the question into the dark, afraid. You didn’t say anything for an interminable moment and I thought you had fallen asleep. Finally, you whispered, ‘I don’t want this to end.’

My heart beating hard, knocking against the wall of my chest, I replied: ‘Me neither.”

“I approached, until I could see the drops of water on your forehead and on the tip of your nose and in the corners of your mouth. We didn’t say a thing. We looked at each other, already beyond words. You were there and I was there, close, breathing. And I moved into your circle. All the way to your waiting body and your calm, open face and the drops on your lips. Your arms closed around me. Hard. And then we were one single body floating in the lake, weightless, never touching the ground.”

“Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want. No one can be blamed for that. And the odds have been stacked against us from the start: we had no manual, no one to show us the way. Not one example of a happy couple made up of boys. How were we supposed to know what to do? Did we even believe that we deserved to get away with happiness?”

“‘I’m glad this happened,’ I said, enjoying the sound of my voice and its gentle vibration in my body.

‘Me too.’ You turned your head towards me, your eyes bright. ‘I knew it would happen since the beginning,’ you said, smiling.

“We walked on through the forest, taking in its furtive sounds, until we reached our clearing and saw the moon on the surface of the lake. We stopped and watched. Then, without a word, we undressed and slipped into the water. We swam, fearless and free and invisible in the brilliant dark.”

“I realise now that we never talked much about our pasts. Maybe it would have changed something if we had, maybe we would have understood each other better and everything would have bene different. Who can say?”

“Did you ever have someone like that, someone that you loved in vain when you were younger? Did you ever feel something like my shame? I always assumed that you must have, that you can’t possibly have gone through life as carelessly as you made out. But I begin to think that not everyone suffers in the same way; that not everyone, in fact, suffers. Not from the same things, at any rate. And in a way this is what made us possible, you and me.”

“This is how I lived back then – through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.”

“My greatest terror was ending up alone. Yet part of me was sure that’s how I would end up, and that it was the worst thing that could happen to someone.”

“There was something about the way you looked at me that made me feel as if you didn’t judge. There are only so many people we meet in life who give us that feeling. And yet that night, as I lay in bed reading after the others had gone to sleep, I was scared. Scared about the hole I had made by trusting you, scared by the vulnerability it had created.”

“You shook your head and stared at some distant point on the horizon. ‘I should have known you’re one of them.’

‘Them what?’ I said, nervous suddenly, wondering whether I had made a big mistake.

You turned to me briskly. ‘Dreamers,’ you said, your mouth widening into a teasing smile.

I let the word ring out, relieved and warm by your smile so close to my face. ‘What’s wrong with dreaming about freedom?’ I said.

‘Freedom?’ you huffed, and smiled, as if you’d had the same conversation many times before. ‘Having oranges and banana every month of the year – is that freedom to you?’ Your smile was gone.

‘There is freedom in having what you want,’ I said carefully, “in choosing for yourself.’”

“I don’t know how many days we stayed at the lake, because each one was like a whole world, every moment new and unrepeatable. In a way these felt like the first days of my life, as if I’d been born by that lake and its water and you. As if I’d shed a skin and left my previous life behind.”

“‘You’ve changed,’ she said, calmly, like a clairvoyant announcing someone’s fate.

‘Have I?’ I made a grimace.

‘Your face.’ She held her hand to it, her middle finger resting on my cheekbone. ‘It looks like something’s opened up, something that was folded tight. Like a fist. I’d never noticed before, but now I do.’

“’So we’ve suddenly become a secret, huh?’

‘We’ve always been a secret, Ludwik. It’s just that until now there was no one to hide from.’

“It occurs to me now that we can never run with our lies indefinitely. Sooner or later we are forced to confront their darkness. We can choose the when, not the if. And the longer we wait, the more painful and uncertain it will be. Even our country is doing it now – facing its archive of lies, wading through the bog towards some new workable truth.”

“I am hungry, suddenly, as if I haven't eaten in weeks. I want borscht and pierogi and warm poppy-seed cake, and I feel this as a vast cavernous emptiness inside me, a yearning for warmth. But it isn’t painful at all. It feels like a promise.”