The days went by one after the other, each more unremarkable than the precedent, and suddenly, a full week had already gone by. One evening after dinner, I was helping my mother with the dishes when a small smile lit up her face and made her break our customary silence. “Have you met a student named Eric?”
“Eric? Yes, how do you know?”
“Have you two talked?”
“A bit… apparently, we used to have the same piano teacher.”
“That’s right. I kept in touch with his mother and we still call each other every once in a while.”
I hmm-hmm’ed evasively. Although I was careful to hide it, my curiosity was piqued. She kept going, “You know, he hasn’t been doing so well either those past years, I’m glad he finally got better and returned to school.” She definitely hadn’t heard about all the weird stuff he did in his free time.
Without a word, my mother wiped her hands and left the kitchen for a few minutes. I had finished cleaning up by the time she came back, holding a glossy piece of paper. She sat at the table, indicating for me to do the same, and handed me a picture. It showed two boys standing side by side on a stage in front of a piano. One of them must have been about twelve, the other closer to fourteen. They wore white shirts, ties and black pants. I pointed to the smaller one, “That’s me.”
“Yes, and this is Eric.”
He hadn’t been kidding. That sullen boy on the picture was the guy I had dubbed Manbun. I smiled despite myself when I noticed that he was a bit chubby back then. Without thinking, I checked his right index finger. The image wasn’t clear enough to make a definitive judgement, but I was pretty sure that it was still perfectly fine at that point. Whatever had happened, it had happened after this picture was taken. “Did he keep playing for a long time after that?”
A cloud passed across my mother’s face, “No, he had to stop not long after… He broke his fingers in an accident. Such a shame, everybody had great hopes for him.”
“You mean he stopped because of that?”
“I think so. It took a long time for him to heal, but he never recovered fully, something about nerve damage. His mother told me it was a hard blow for him. He probably gave up after a while. Such a pity.” The more I looked at the picture, the more images started swirling in my mind. Some of them I knew were part of this memory, others I couldn’t tell.
“What happened?”
My mother kept her eyes on the photo. It didn’t seem like such a fond memory anymore. “Apparently, there was an accident while you two were out biking. He fell in a ditch along the road and crushed his fingers in the fall. Somehow, that student, Daniel, was there as well and he brought him to the emergency. Just passing by, or so he said at the time.”
Was it suspiciousness I detected in her voice? If this story was true, it meant Manbun and Daniel had met at least once before. How come neither of them had told me about it? I slowly started to understand that this accident might be at the root of Manbun’s bitterness toward me.
“After that event, you locked yourself up in your room and wouldn’t come out. We thought it might help if you spent a few days at your grandparents’ house, since you always liked being around grandma. But then, that’s where it happened…”
My chest felt tight and my vision blurred. I got up, but had to hold on to the chair for balance. The picture was taken away from my hands. A distant voice asked, “Damian, are you ok?”
“Why did you show me this picture?”
“I’m sorry, I was just glad you met Eric again… He used to be a good influence on you. I thought we might try talking about these things a little.”
I went to my bedroom and leaned back against the closed door. Why was I being this pathetic? I couldn’t understand why this memory affected me so strongly. It was a bad one, but not for me in particular. Strange images and sensations were becoming unstuck and trying to resurface.
For the first time in years, maybe because I was visiting after several months of being absent, I really took a look at my room. My old room where I had spent all my childhood and teenage years. It seemed like a foreign place suddenly. The old desk, the old cupboard, the old bed, the old ceiling, window, floor, fan, cracks in the wall… I knew those drawers contained some of the stuff I had written when I was a younger. Most of it with pen and paper, so behind my time.
Maybe forgetting hadn’t been a bad thing; it might have been the best thing that had happened to me. The opportunity to shrug off my mistakes, and other people’s mistakes, like they hadn’t happened and start again with a blank slate. I wanted to burn all those poems, and the desk with it, burn down this bedroom which had seen me too many times in ways in which I no longer wanted to see myself. It didn’t belong in this world anymore. Manbun and my mother could go to hell. All they did was hold me back to a past me.
I was startled by a sound. It was a notification telling me I had received a text. I extended my arm and took my phone from the bedside table. The message was from an unknown sender. There was a video attached with those words:
Just passed by to get back my stuff ;)
I didn’t immediately understand what that meant. It must have been a wrong number. I got curious and decided to play the video. That’s when my blood ran cold. It showed the dark, empty interior of some apartment. Two men could be heard giggling in the background. I understood right away that they weren’t supposed to be there, and that this hadn’t been a wrong number, and what the “stuff” in the message was referring to. The sender’s number was the Boss’s phone, he’d broken into my apartment to retrieve it. And the apartment in the video was Daniel’s.
I ran out of my room and down the stairs. My mother was reading in the kitchen. She looked up at me with concern when she saw me.
“Mom! I need to go back! There’s an emergency!”
“What happened?”
I hesitated for a moment. I didn’t know exactly what had happened, but even then, I wouldn’t have told her. I had to wing it, “Some friend… Clara… Just had her appendix removed.”
“Poor girl… Aren’t the doctors taking care of her?”
She had a point. “Yeah… but there’s no one else around and it’s shitty for her.”
“And I was hoping to have you here a few more days. You’ll have to introduce me some day.”
About two hours and a half later, I was standing outside of Daniel’s building, looking up at his balcony window. The lights were off, and there was no reply when I rang his bell. I decided to wait and see if he would come back soon. I had tried calling him about a hundred times, but he hadn’t picked up. I told myself that it was normal, it was January 1st, he was probably at a party, or passed out drunk, or both. There had been no clue in the video suggesting that Daniel had been hurt or anything. In all likelihood, he had been away when it was taken. No point in panicking yet.
I sat on the front step and pulled my scarf over my nose. Even for January, it was a chilly night. Was it frightening that, at that moment, I thought I would rather lose my fingers and toes to frostbite than leave before Daniel came back? After all, life without him had been like being frozen alive. Those years had been spent in a grey cloud; nothing stood out, there was nothing I wanted, nothing I enjoyed, people were annoying at best. Sadness, pain, desire, joy and happiness had all been erased from my life, until Daniel’s reappearance gave them a shape I could see again.
There was a buzzing in my pocket. I took out my phone and saw a reply from Daniel:
Sorry I missed your calls, I left my phone in my coat. Are you ok?
I sighed in relief. He must have been at a party then. I typed:
Yes. Will you be back soon?
Soon after, I received:
I’m on my way. I’ll call you when I get home.
About fifteen minutes later, a taxi stopped in front of the entrance. A tall silhouette came out of it and stopped in its tracks when it saw me. “Damian? What are you doing here?”
Daniel took a few bewildered steps toward me. “Were you waiting for me? I didn’t know you…”
I had missed him tremendously this past week, and now I felt like a fool for not missing him even more. Once the taxi was gone, the darkness engulfed us once again. “I couldn’t wait to see you,” I said sheepishly as I got up. He took me in his arms and I hugged him back as tightly as I could. It was such an immense relief to see him. As much as I wanted this moment to last, I considered we shouldn’t wait too long to see if another surprise waited for him upstairs.
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