During puberty I was certain I was going to die. During puberty, I wanted to die. I was that frightened. Of everyone and everything. Of other people. I didn’t like crowds. I was certain that whenever I got near them, people were talking about me. I was frightened of the dark. Of the older boys. Of their roughness. Of the fact that they instinctively recognized the victim in me. Of my classmates. They didn’t like that I was top of the class. I only felt safe at home. But this illusion burst too. My father shattered it. Once he tried to hit me. Dad! Fathers don’t beat their children, they are fathers, not strangers, Dad!

They bought me a tracksuit. Blue bottoms. Blue-yellow top. Beautiful. In my few attempts to become close with the boys my age, I played football with them. I got in their way. Soon I got bored, and they stopped passing the ball to me. I left. Forgot my top. The neighbor found it and brought it home. Outside our house there were men, smoking and chatting. They were discussing something with my dad. Next to our house there was a pile of rubble. I was coming down the road, the men noticed me, someone said something to Dad, he smiled, they all smiled. I shivered. Dad called me over. The men were watching. I went closer. He asked me where my top was. I jumped. It wasn’t on me. I was silent. He raised his voice, is that how I looked after my new clothes, I didn’t deserve anything. He lifted his hand to hit me. Aimed. I saw the shadow of his hand. Stepped back. It wasn’t a slap on the cheek. It was more of a graze on the neck. Didn’t hurt a lot. But it was humiliating. He humiliated me in front of strangers. I’m sure he did it for them. To show them who’s the boss at home. Who’s the man. The others smiled approvingly. I looked at them. Went mad. I grabbed a handful of stones and threw them at our windows. A few of them hit. It was quick. The men gasped. Dad stepped forward, I took aim with a stone in my hand and yelled at him that if he hit me now, I’d wait for him to fall asleep and kill him. I was serious. I was crying. My breathing was heavy. My father swore. And relented. I’m not sure if he got scared or simply changed his mind. It doesn’t matter. Two things happened that day: I realized that not even home is a safe place, and I stopped loving my father. I was ten years old.

Fear was my skin, loneliness my only garment. I wanted to die so I’d no longer be scared. And for there to be lots of people at my funeral. So I wouldn’t be lonely. I escaped from loneliness in books. I used to read a lot. Really a lot. Every day. Every night. For hours on end. I loved, and I still do, the smell of paper and ink. This smell calms me. Brings me peace. I turned reading into a ritual. A fetish. I never read a book with dirty hands. I didn’t dog-ear the pages or fold the cover. Never. We had a decent-sized library. I liked rearranging the books. Dad made the bookcase. It was in the pantry. Right next to the bathroom. I have no idea why it was there. It was made from planks lined up one on top of the other, secured with ropes and fixed to the wall. It was difficult to open the pantry door. To get to the bookcase, I had to make an effort. Dad read a lot too. He never refused me money for a book. Never. I read voraciously. Children’s paperbacks. Adults’ hardcovers. Classics. Fairy tales. I read books I understood and books I didn’t. Books about Native Americans and forefathers. Books about crime enthusiasts. Books about freedom and books about slavery. Books about knights and ladies. Books on morality and dishonor. Books with well-concealed eroticism. I lived other lives; I fell asleep and woke up in other people’s beds; wore other people’s clothes; I was loved by other people. I couldn’t wait to get back from school and bury myself in a book. I was becoming a recluse and hardly went out. Sometimes, almost forcefully, Mom and Dad made me play with other children. I would get back home and dive headfirst into a book again. It’s not as if I never spent a whole day with other children outdoors, I did. But I preferred books. That went on for a long time. I remember one summer. Holidays. Lull. Scorching heat. In the village square there is a bus stop, I’m sitting on the bench with a friend, smoking. Boredom. On the square in front of us a shirtless boy, wearing just bright yellow shorts, draws lazy circles with a black bike. He’s barefoot. A stranger. I ask my friend who he is. What do you mean who, he says, don’t you remember when we were in kindergarten, you used to beat him up all the time. I laugh. That’s not true. I can’t tolerate violence, I’ve never been able to. It’s true, my friend insists. He calls the boy by name, he comes over, stops his bike, gets off, puts it on its stand. We’re all silent. He sits with us. Next to me. He puts his arm around my shoulders, as if it’s always been there, and says, You and I will be friends until we die. That’s all. Only those words.

We were inseparable. Together. All day. Every day. Almost twenty-four hours. We developed a special feeling toward each other. Something like telepathy. Once I bought him a T-shirt from the shop in the nearby town. A nice one. Red. For no reason. I went back to the village, beaming while imagining how happy he would be with the surprise. I waited for him to come round, like every other day. I was in my room. He walked in. Alone. A sneaky smile on his face. He held his hands behind his back. I asked him what he was hiding, and he grinned from ear to ear; his smile lit up the room. He said he had a present for me. Hoped I’d like it. A T-shirt. Red. From the same shop. Bought the previous day. We hadn’t talked about it. My big brother was never there, but I could grow up with him instead; we had lots to catch up on. All the years we hadn’t known each other, knowing of each other. We became an entity. Encapsulated. We isolated the world.

We talked a lot and about everything. And we also remained silent for days. I would read aloud to him. He showed me how he rode a horse. We told each other about our childhoods. We compared our families. He became the most interesting novel. A novel with no end. I didn’t protest. There was something wild in him. Something in his eyes. Something I didn’t have. It was a calling. It was hunger. His eyes held a hunger to break with the tamed, the civilized. He loved animals and they loved him back. He was the master of all the village dogs. They would follow him as if they were his knights. He liked eating raw meat every so often. His chestnut brown hair would turn golden in the summer. His body—slim when we first met—became strong. He began training. Learned to fight. So no one could beat him up. We were constantly together. I missed him during the week. He went to school in another town. I counted the days till the weekend when he would return to the village with his family. Then we caught up on all the hours we hadn’t spent together. We fought a lot. We argued a lot.

I needed to be loved all the time and sometimes I would put him to the test. I was already smoking then. Quite a lot. He didn’t smoke. One day I had no cash on me. We were together with other friends at a tiny pub. I was drinking coffee. I had run out of cigarettes. And I wanted one. I asked him to buy me a pack. I would pay him back in a few days. He refused. Categorically. It wasn’t for the money; it was for my health, he said. I told him my health is mine. Not his. He smiled and refused again. I got upset. Picked up my coffee and moved to another table. He came and sat next to me. Tried to hug me. I pushed him back. I told him I didn’t want him around. He realized I was serious. He hadn’t realized how much I liked smoking. He went to the bar. Returned with a pack of fancy cigarettes. Left it on the table and said it was for me. He sat back on his chair. I picked up the pack, threw it at him and shouted an insult. I saw the hurt in his eyes. I liked it. He took the pack. Slowly removed the wrapping. Took out one cigarette. Crushed it in his hand and put it in his mouth. Chewed it. Swallowed it with a sip of water. Everyone went silent. We all looked at each other. He took a second cigarette out. Crushed it and put it in his mouth. He was really angry. Someone tried to take the pack and it fell to the floor. He took a third cigarette out. I got up and went over to him. His eyes swam with tears. He’d always react like this whenever he felt unjustly accused of something. I hugged him. I felt his muscles tensing. His hand clenched into a fist. He didn’t move. I lowered my head to his. Breathed in his scent. And told him that I didn’t want us to argue and that he was right about my health, I just really wanted a cigarette. He spat the chewed tobacco on the floor. Trampled it with his foot. Looked into my eyes. We had made up.

I must’ve loved him from the first day. That sudden love. Hitherto nonexistent. It’s never been in your life. Then it comes and it’s as if it’s always been there. It took me a while to understand this love. And not to be scared of it. It was like a force of nature. It robbed me of all my self-preservation instincts. If someone had told me that for some reason I had to die instead of him, I wouldn’t have asked why but when. He liked giving me books. For me to read them. Then tell him the story. It’s not that he didn’t read. He did. He’d say that when I retold these stories to him, he wouldn’t just hear them, he would see them. He was the first person who believed in my talent as a storyteller. I read a lot. And I recounted a lot for him. We liked scary stories. And adventures. Stories about murderers, vampires. I used to be frightened while reading them and while retelling them. But I didn’t give up. It ignited my imagination too. Imperceptibly from a reader and a storyteller, I became a co-author. I wasn’t really changing the story. I decorated it. Sometimes, I’d invent a new character. Sometimes, I killed someone. Saved another one. I handed out justice and took it away depending on my mood. Or on which character I liked at the time. At other times, just to annoy him, I would kill his favorite character. He would get fired up, say it wasn’t fair, what was this stupid book and how could I possibly like it. When I told him that his favorite character was alive and well, and they’d died only in my story, not in the book, he was puzzled at first. Then he would smile and tell me that I must become a writer. I would smile too and tell him I would like to be a doctor or an actor, not a writer. Years later, I came to understand that my desire to change the truth, to adorn it, to invent a new truth was, in essence, a desire to change my own reality. To invent it anew. To edit it. To direct it. Back then I simply thought it was entertaining. Not that it was a necessity. I liked, after telling yet another scary story, to pick up his bike, turn off its lights and ride it on the dark streets of our village. And to be frightened. Sometimes the streets were lit. I was still frightened. Of the stories I told. I loved riding a bike. His bike. I never had my own bike. Poor child. Poor family. Never enough money at home to buy me a bike. Every other child had bikes. They looked after them. They were jealous. He always gave me his bike whenever I asked. I dreamed of a bike. He of a motorcycle.

A few years later I still didn’t have a bike, but he got a motorcycle. A big one. I think it was white, Japanese. New, powerful. He rode it like crazy. He loved riding. I loved to ride it with him. I remember one night we were driving along the international road that passed by the neighboring village. He accelerated. Neither of us was wearing a helmet. The speed kept mounting. When it reached more than sixty miles per hour, he turned toward me and told me not to be frightened. He lifted his hands off the bars and slowly stood up on the footrests. Spread his arms. Started screaming. I was trying not to cling to him so I wouldn’t throw off his balance and we wouldn’t crash. I screamed, too. We were floating in the middle of the road, right along the center. There weren’t many cars, but the drivers of those we passed were honking like crazy. He drove like this for a few miles. Then stopped. Pulled to the side. We got off the bike. I was trembling and needed to pee. I lit a cigarette. We didn’t speak. I embraced him. We stayed like that. I told him not to beckon death. He whispered that I hadn’t understood. He wasn’t beckoning death. He was beckoning life. I answered that life favors the brave but so does death. He said he knew. We got back on the bike. He drove like a normal person. We returned to the village. I couldn’t sleep that night.

We remained friends. We argued often. Then would quickly make up. Our village is small. Like most villages in the country. You could cross it from end to end on foot in about fifteen minutes. He used to pick me up on his motorcycle. To go for a beer. That was the first and last summer I drank beer. Beer was no friend of mine. It wasn’t for me. I got drunk that night. Vomiting. Disgusting taste. Vile. It bloats your stomach; you need to pee all the time. The evening was pleasant, the two of us, friends, music, beer, snooker. At one point I asked him to take me back home. He refused. He wanted to stay longer. I dug in my heels, told him he had promised me. It wasn’t true. We had a scuffle. I took his keys. Dropped them in the beer. He didn’t say a word. Took them out and had a sip. I insisted he drive me home. He refused. I grabbed the keys and threw them on the street. It turned awkward. Someone brought the keys back. He put them away. I called him a liar. He only smiled. I was mental. Hurled insults at him. The owner turned up. Asked if there was a problem. I screamed and told him to clear off. I pushed a glass, threw a bottle on the floor. I had completely lost it. Kept insisting he take me home on his motorcycle. His smile was gone. He bowed his head and clenched his fists. Some friends pushed me outside. My anger is like this. It comes out of nowhere and then it vanishes. That night it wasn’t going anywhere. Outside I carried on shouting, kicking stones, the nearby fence, a bench. I screamed that I didn’t care about him, that I hated him, that his motorcycle was crap, better he killed himself on it . . . then I left.

Halfway along the short road home I met a mutual acquaintance. I asked him for a smoke. We got to chatting. We sat next to each other. Soon our hands found each other. It was quiet. Midnight. We heard a noise. A bike revving. It sped off angrily. Our mutual acquaintance got scared, but I insisted he stay. The bike came around after a minute. He saw us. Slammed the brakes on. I got up and slowly walked to him. He clutched the handlebars with both hands. He was angry. That’s exactly what I wanted. Asked me why I was doing this. The truth was that I craved attention. He understood. I was silent. He took me home. We agreed to meet up and go swimming at the lake by the village.

I waited for him the following day, but he didn’t turn up. I decided he was being late on purpose, just to annoy me. Because of the previous night’s argument. I was impatient. Went out to look for him, hurriedly. Unconsciously. Near the village hall, I saw his mother. She was weeping. She wouldn’t answer my questions about what was going on, what had happened. She kept shaking her head, saying his name. I ran toward the road leading out of the village, toward the lake. I saw the ambulance and a crowd gathered by the bridge. I pushed them aside. He was lying on the road, breathing. Thank you God! I pelted back to the village, spotted a car, I remember the color—blue. I can’t remember the driver. I stood in the middle of the road and flung out my arms. The driver stopped. I managed to say that I needed to get to the hospital in town. The man nodded. The news had gone round. I flew through the emergency room entrance, asked for car crash casualties. I was told where to go. In the corridors, people and the smell of disinfectants. Stuffy air. Urine. I saw his father. Crying. His brother was there too. I saw a stretcher. Someone had to accompany the stretcher from room to room while they did the initial examinations. I asked if I could. I held on to the metal stand with the drip system. They were infusing some fluid into his body. He was brave. He didn’t scream or groan even though his body was shattered. I remember his leg had multiple fractures, his pelvis, hip, knee, ankle . . . I think he was losing consciousness. At least he was breathing. He opened his eyes. Looked at me. Recognized me. Gently nodded. I leaned toward him. I knew what he was going to say. I deserved the question. My ear neared his lips. He opened his mouth. There was blood in it. His lips were swollen. He had hurt his face too. He cleared his throat and said, Are you happy now? Are you happy I’m in this state? Then he closed his eyes. I started crying.

I returned to the village. No one gave me a lift. That same night I discovered that I could pray and howl at the same time. Every day, every God-given day I was in the hospital. At the beginning they didn’t allow visitors. Only his parents. His room was on the ground floor. It had a balcony. And we, his friends, would jump over the railing just to get a glimpse of him. Then we would jump back down, smoke, drink coffee, and talk quietly as if we were frightened to wake him up, then more of his friends would come, and then even more. His mother was already there. She came the day after the accident. She cried almost constantly. But quietly. On the balcony, so he wouldn’t hear her. And she smoked. A lot. Hardly ate. His father’s eyes were red too. And his brother’s. I watched the three of them—how they ate together on the balcony. How they touched each other’s hands while passing around food. How his father lovingly put his hand on his mother’s shoulder. How she tried to smile. How his brother’s body was always slightly angled toward the room. How they took turns going inside while he was sleeping or unconscious to check on him. There was so much love in this family, so much togetherness, so much that I was jealous.

He got better after a while. I was allowed to go to his room and sit beside the bed. There was a wall of tension between his mother and me. Now I regret not finding the energy to stand before her. To talk to her. To tell her that there was nothing disgusting in my love for her son, that I had no one, that I was lonely, that he was the only living person who knew me, understood me and knew how I felt, that he was my only friend. But I was scared. And angry. I felt guilty. For having to explain the unexplainable. To dress it up. To roll it round my mouth as if it were an old dry piece of bread. I felt accused. By everyone. It’s possible I was imagining it. The past sometimes is not what we want it to be. After yet another operation he hardly ate, but he needed nourishment. I was there. In the room. On the balcony. His mom and I tried to share the same space, without it exploding. She tried to feed him; he refused. He told her he wanted me to feed him. I came into the room. He had lost weight and grown a beard. He ate a bit of a banana. A tiny bit. Then fell asleep. He slept peacefully. He’d wake up frequently. Then fall asleep again. During one of his times awake I told him that I really wanted us to be together all our lives and asked him to promise me that he wouldn’t die before me, because the thing I’m living through right now, while watching him, is unbearable. I wouldn’t be able to cope being alive and him being dead.

He didn’t answer. Fell asleep. I stood next to him; watched him sleep. I watched that painfully familiar face, trying to supress my desire to touch it, not knowing how little I knew about my ability to cope with the unbearable.

He woke up after a while, asked for water; I gave him some and then he told me that wasn’t the way it was going to happen. You won’t die before me. You won’t manage on your own. It’s hard. I just checked. I’ll go first. I’ll build a house. I’ll wait for you. I got scared. I asked him what he had dreamed of. He said it wasn’t a dream. I told him to stop talking nonsense. He only smiled and fell asleep again. He got better. Recovered. He was the same as before. He was left with only a slight limp. Back then I didn’t know that this was a postponement. No one knew. When we escape death by a hair’s breadth, we think we’ve defeated it. We celebrate life. We covet the person who’s already looked death in the eyes, held its gaze without blinking. We forgive them for everything. We love them. Sometimes more than they deserve. We make promises. And we don’t keep them. That we’ll be better people. More careful. That we’ll change this or that streak in our personality. And we even believe what we say. Nothing ever changes. Nothing. Ever. We carry on celebrating by inertia. We no longer celebrate life. But the everyday. We celebrate going to bed. Falling asleep. Waking up. Drinking coffee. The morning showers. Having sex. Making love. We deceive ourselves that these are the most necessary little things in life. The truth is, it’s not we who are celebrating—Death is celebrating. She is the biggest winner. The gala is always in her honor. Not ours. She knows how to wait. We tire. She doesn’t. Death loves us. Fact. Her love is unrequited. Death loves only the living. The dead don’t interest her. He and I stopped caring for each other. Not straight away. Not immediately. Not even imperceptibly. You could feel it. I couldn’t stop him. Habit settled between us, unnoticed. It became a third presence. Invisible. Tangible. Our friendship became tired of proving itself. It retreated. We no longer thought in the future tense. He met someone else. I met someone else. We still saw each other. But rarely. Briefly. With awkwardness between us.

I accepted my defeat. Moved somewhere else. To another house. With other books. With a different person. Heavy. Clever. Egocentric. Alcoholic. One who loved me. Who had the biggest library I’ve ever seen in my life. It was entirely at my disposal. I loved his intellect. He loved my intellect. Not the flesh. Erudite. Brilliant mind. Mighty drive for self-destruction. Suspicious. Possessive. Jealous in a particular way. Older than me. He didn’t become my lover. He became my family. A difficult family. Two wayward characters. Forever-hungry egos. Squared. But our intellects were synchronized. Equally unloved. Equally over-loved. To whom I was family. Who was my family. Who recognized my demons. And showed me his.

We lived together for a while. Not too long. It was unbearable. He introduced me to the world of art. Encouraged me to write. Paid for my education. Just like that, without asking for anything in return. He wanted to be part of someone’s life. To be important to someone. To be of significance. And for me, he was. He gave me a new environment, a new circle of friends. I no longer lived in just a town. I lived in a big town. The capital. I traveled abroad for my education. After one of those journeys, I went back to the village. I missed Mom. In some ways Dad, too.

My sister was going to be there with her husband and children. My brother, as always, would be absent. The black sheep. There was agreement on the topic of my brother. Mom and I against Dad and my sister. Mom and I thought it was Dad’s fault that my brother became a criminal. Dad and my sister thought this was simply the way he was. There was a brawl—explosive and luminous—on the topic at every family gathering.

After dinner with the family, I went for a walk. I saw familiar faces. Said hello. Smiled. Asked questions. People asked me questions, too. I picked my way to a friend’s house, I wanted to see him. I went quickly through the hushed village. I liked spring evenings there. I loved them. Silence. Noises. Smell from the only bakery, bread baking right then. The small bridge over the small river running through the village. The town hall. The former school. A series of soothing clichés. I was almost at the house when a car pulled up next to me. White. Unknown. The door opened. I remember the light from the streetlamp, the weak glimmer in the car. I couldn’t see clearly who was inside. Then I heard his voice. I got in. Closed the door. And everything ended. Everything began. Nothing had happened in between. As if I had just gone out three minutes ago to throw out the trash and then returned. We greeted dawn in the car. We talked all night long. I didn’t get tired. I didn’t feel sleepy. I found my lost paradise. Then a car wash took him away from me. Savagely. Irretrievably. He had gone to wash his car. A faulty device killed him. The end! The end! The end!

T

H

E

E

N

D

!

I learned exactly what the word “never” meant. I’d never see him again. I’d never run my fingers through his hair again, and he’d never be annoyed by it. He would never call me by all the names he came up with specially for me. I’d never have a friend like him again. Never again . . . I had never cried for someone like that before. Part of me will never stop crying for this loss. I didn’t want to watch but I did watch all the same how they closed the lid of his coffin. He was dressed in his favorite black leather jacket. I didn’t want to hear but I heard all the same how the lumps of earth fell onto his coffin. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to leave. I continued to cry. I cried for him. I cried, of course, for myself, too. I bent down. Took a fistful of soil. I straightened up. I began walking. I held the lump in my cupped hand. It was cold. I warmed it in my palm. Put it in my mouth. Chewed it. Swallowed it. It had the taste of what it was. Soil. It had the taste of what he would become. And then I. Soil. I was hurting after his death. Physically. For months on end. His absence was painful. A dull ache under the ribcage. Constant. Sometimes, I would be doing something, and his absence would sweep over me. It would stop my breathing. Literally. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t have the courage to commit suicide. I dreamed of him every night. Colorful, meaningful dreams. Full of scents and noises. Full of him. Alive. Warm. Real. Genuine. Present. I would often embrace him in my dreams. That’s when I would wake up. In an embrace with the empty space around me.

I have no idea how I survived. I began writing after his death. I was trying to extract death from me. To spit out the anger. To describe the pain. To give voice to the feeling of hopelessness. I wrote little. And badly. I watched the words that came from my hand and I was disgusted by how ugly they were, how clumsily they described my feelings. I would read aloud. It was worse. I would crumple the sheets of paper and swear never to touch them again. After a day or two, I felt I could cope and would write again. Again badly. Again disgusted. Again, I crumpled the pages.

One afternoon, I fell asleep. I can’t remember my dream. I woke up. It was hot. I was sweating. I grabbed a piece of paper. And the words flowed. A swarm. Meaningful. Beautiful. I read them aloud and I heard them talk with their own voices. I folded the paper carefully. I kissed it. Put it away. The adrenaline was drumming in my ears, pulsating in my throat. I went for a walk. It didn’t help. I returned home. From my hands, from the tips of my fingers, energy was streaming. Piping hot. I can’t explain it any other way. And there was a warmth in place of the pain under my ribcage. That’s what I feel now when my desire to write is unstoppable. I exchanged one reality for another. And described it. And believed it. Categorically. When I got tired of living, I wrote. When I was frightened of living, I wrote. When my memories faded, I wrote. Writing soothed me. It gave me another possible life. I always wrote about myself. I was always the protagonist. I only changed the names. I was also the secondary characters. And the children. And the women. I lived in the books I wrote. Life outside of them interested me less and less. People, faces, and events passed by without rousing interest in me. Months. Years. Beds. Meals. Journeys. Trains. Phone calls. I lived in the real world under duress. My life was like a badly staged performance. Sometimes I forgot to eat. Sometimes I forgot to shower. Sometimes I didn’t know what day it was, what month. What year. I didn’t want to know either. I wrote to live. Every day. I never showed anyone my writing. I didn’t want to. I wrote for myself. I wrote by hand. With a ballpoint pen. With a pencil. With a felt-tip. With a marker. On a computer. On napkins. On notebooks. On loose sheets of paper. In the margins of newspapers. I was writing on the walls at home. I wrote on book covers. I was lonely. People avoided me. I was rude to them. I found them stupid. Ignorant. I lived in a different place. Shared apartments with criminals. Drug addicts. One of them killed someone. They locked him up. I lived with a woman for a while. Then on my own. I severed the past. Killed it. Or at least that’s what I thought back then.