That night, I had a nightmare. I was walking in a dark place, so dark I couldn’t even discern how spacious it was. Faint, unfamiliar silhouettes surrounded me. They kept passing by me, calling out my name and offering their condolences. Was I at a funeral? Whose was it? There was liquid dripping all over me, viscous and sticky. I knew it was my blood. I was so tired that eventually I couldn’t keep walking anymore and I fell to the ground. Instead of the carpeted floor of the funeral parlour, my body met with a thick layer of powdery snow. I was outside, it was cold, so cold my feet and hands grew numb and I was slowly turning into ice. Something soft brushed against my leg. A cat… Daniel was by my side. “I’m so sorry, Damian,” he said, before walking away and disappearing. I tried to call him, tell him to stay, but my voice was gone. Suddenly, all became silent and dark.
I woke up at that moment, breathing heavily, disoriented and drenched in sweat. I reached feverishly for my phone on the bedside table, found Daniel’s number and hit the “call” button. After a few rings, someone picked up, “Damian? What’s wrong?”
“Daniel! Where… where are you?”
“I’m home… It’s 3 a.m., are you alright?”
As soon as he said those words, I realised what was going on. Just a bad dream. I wiped my forehead with my hand, looking around me. I slowly recognised my bedroom, bathed in the moonlight that pierced through the half-closed curtains.
“I just had a… a nightmare. Sorry… I woke you up.”
“It’s fine, I wasn’t sleeping.”
The quiet sound of his voice calmed me down. Only a bad dream. A silence stretched on until it grew thin and I was compelled to speak again.
“How come you’re not sleeping?” I whispered.
“I’m more worried about you right now.”
I shook my head and laughed a little. “I mean, there’s something, no? You've been different, lately." It wasn’t a good time to have a conversation like this. Then again, there might never be a better time.
"It's nothing... really. It's just..." He struggled to get the words out. "It’s Natalie... we broke up a few weeks ago."
"Oh... I'm sorry."
"It's ok… She didn't get the position here, so she'll have to look for another job in a different city. We've already been living apart for a while now... Things suddenly became too complicated. It’s strange, you know…"
The new information was gradually being processed in my mind. Natalie was gone. Daniel was not engaged anymore. After a moment, I noticed he hadn’t completed his sentence.
“What’s strange?”
He hesitated. “The truth is, I'm not that sad about it. The hardest thing is to realise that my life is not as perfect as I would like it to be. You know, I made a lot of sacrifices for my career… It wasn’t easy, but with Natalie I could pretend I had everything under control, that I knew what I was doing, professionally, personally... And now... it all seems so empty. I'm not sure why I tried so hard."
His tone was quiet and detached, hushed like the moonlight, as if he was afraid something might break if he spoke to loudly. Up to now, I had assumed the rapidity of his progress had been due to his innate genius, when in reality he had dedicated his whole adult life to getting where he was now.
"Do you regret it?"
He laughed softly. It wasn't bitter... I don't think there could ever be an ounce of bitterness in Daniel. But there was something.
"Yes, I guess I regret it. When I started working here, I was already afraid I was making a mistake. I'm still doubting I'm fit for this. But you know… with you around, it's all been a lot better, somehow. Sometimes, I have the feeling someone, or something has been watching over me."
Was he talking about the ghost? Then, I saw what it was in Daniel’s voice that had caught my attention. It was the trace of something unsaid, it always tainted his words, his gaze, his movements. It was something he didn't want to tell me, or couldn't tell me.
“Daniel, you’re not leaving, right?”
“No… At least, not for now. Why?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry I called like that.”
“It’s fine… I’m glad you did.”
A thick silence gradually wrapped itself around the conversation like a cocoon. We said goodnight and then I was on my own again. I can’t say I slept well after that, or at all, but I was definitely more at peace.
Just when I thought there was still plenty of time left before the final exams, they hit me like a ton of bricks. It seemed there would never be enough time to finish studying for all my courses. Paradoxically, it also felt like they would never end. When it came down to the day of the exam for Daniel’s course, I was so jittery I could barely hold a pen. Right before it started, a bunch of students were waiting in the corridor adjacent to the auditorium in which the examination would take place. I stayed away from them as much as possible. They were all doing last minute revisions, which stressed me out even more. I leaned against the wall, trying to calm myself down, when I became aware of a presence beside me. I looked up and found Daniel standing there. Discreetly, he took one of my hands in his and gently pressed it. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll be fine.” Our fingers brushed against each others as he left my side. He greeted some students on his way and entered the auditorium. A few moments later, we were allowed in.
The exam in question was a 3-hour long kind of thing. Daniel and one invigilator remained present the whole time to watch over us. I don’t know why Daniel had said I would be fine. It was one of the most difficult exams I’d had until now, and considering that the other students around me were all scratching their heads, writing, erasing and then writing again, they probably shared my feeling. Nonetheless, it took me only two out of the three hours to finish.
Still, I decided to wait a bit longer. About a third of the students were already gone. As time passed, they rose one after the other – Clara, Nicole, and then some others I only vaguely knew. I kept picking at a few commas and pondering some multiple-choice questions. C or D? “All of these answers?” or “Only B & C”? When I looked up from my copy again, there were two minutes left and the last student, apart from myself, was leaving. I at last rose from my chair, took my exam booklet and walked down the stairs to the desk at the front.
“How was it?” Daniel asked as I handed him my copy. By his expression, I could tell he was wondering whether he’d miscalculated how easily I’d go through the whole thing. I glanced at the invigilator, sitting on a chair by the black board a little farther behind Daniel.
“Would you mind correcting it now?” I asked.
Daniel questioned me silently. “Sure, come with me,” he murmured.
We walked back to his office. Daniel went behind his desk and removed the bundle of exam copies from his satchel. He looked up at me, still waiting in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
“I can wait outside if you want,” I said.
He shook his head, smiling. With a brief glance at the chair in front of his desk, he gestured for me to sit. I obeyed and sat in silence as he went through my exam, putting a checkmark in red pencil next to some items, crossing out some others. It was already past 7 p.m., the sun had set more than an hour ago. I’m sure he wanted to be home more than anything else, but I needed this to be done. After a while, he leafed through the booklet one last time, adding up numbers with a calculator, and wrote the total mark on the first page. He smirked without looking at me, “92 percent… I would have expected better, but it’s not bad.” Was he making fun of me?
He turned aside to enter my grade in his computer. “So, your final grade for the course is A-.”
“A-?”
“Are you disappointed? After the kind of assignment you handed in back in October, I think you caught up pretty nicely.”
He turned off his computer, removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Just like that, the professor was gone, and here was Daniel. He sighed in relief, leaning back in his chair. “I was going to order something to eat for tonight…” he said. “Would you like to join me?”
My heart leaped so high, it almost made an audible “thump” when it hit the ceiling. “Yes, sure.”
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