juliaigual_’s Reviews > Separate Rooms > Status Update

“For Christ’s sake, Leo, all it was was a three-year flirt! No more no less. You lived together for two months, or maybe three, or five at the most. And you’re wasting your life away for the sake of a few nights you spent with a stranger?”

Es que tiene razón

“Leo, why don’t you come to terms with your heart and accept the fact that you love me?”

Dilo Thomaaaas

“I make a pact with the devil. I want your eyes, all over again and at any price. I smoke a cigarette to seal the pact, but then, my darling, I discover to my horror that the devil is none other than you.”

Mi pobre Thomas

“He knows that, in the years to come, no one will remember his lost love, no one will rest a hand on his shoulder to tell him it will all pass. He will not show his mourning on the main street of his own home town. He will not see other people’s eyes reflecting the pain that fills his. He will not shake hands or embrace anyone else. And no one will accompany Thomas’s body to the cemetery, not even he.”

“Birth, death, people parting, they are all just stages in the collective life of the place. This life always leaves room for hope, because the community survives and evolves. Everyone leaves children and friends and fond memories behind, and the life of the town carries on an inch at a time, founded on these deep-seated bonds and feelings.”

M’encanta la vida de poble

“He is fleeing across Europe, fleeing from the horror of losing Thomas. He is fleeing from death. […] And just like an animal nearing its end, he does not want to live any more. He is fleeing from one death to draw closer to his own.”

“Leo made him stay out there, with nothing on, in the chill night. ‘You mean everything to me,’ Leo said after a moment in his shaky German, clinging to Thomas’s shoulders and sobbing.”

“With tears in his eyes he takes his head in his hands and utters the syllables of Thomas’s name, as if to hold him still close to him. Hundreds of miles apart, one of them still confined to his hospital bed, and the other sitting as if petrified on a hard chair in his kitchen, they are both young men with an unspeakable fear of dying.”

“Fathers and mothers, the church, the state, the registrar of deaths, all were laying claim to what was theirs. They were putting things back in order, burying and committing everything to the dust of archives, the dust that reduces it all to nought. All of it except the insignificant grief of a young stranger.”

How sad he couldn’t mourn him because there was no label to their love

“Leo’s lips seek out Thomas’s mouth. Coloured smoke wafts up from the stage. And there, amid the jubilation that marks the end of the concert, amid the clapping, chanting, and whistling, amid the smoke encircling them and blocking them from view for a few moments, squeezing each other until it hurts, they have the first kiss of their life.”