Sighing in frustration, I reply, “I’m not the one who’s playing around with my life, Jason. It seems like someone else is and I hope he’s having fun with it, because it’s not fun for me at all.”
“Alex…tell me what I can do. Anything, and I’ll do it.”
If he had asked me five years ago, that afternoon in the hospital after I had fainted and didn’t find him at my side when I woke up, I would have asked him to stay with me, to hold me in his arms and never leave me. But he wasn’t there and I woke up afraid with the awareness that I had lost everything. That I had lost him, my best friend and my only love.
When he showed up in the hospital three days later, with that lost, desperate look in his eyes, I understood he didn’t have the courage to come close to me and that his suffering was there, oppressing his heart, and the only thing I was able to do was to send him away to allow him to have a full happy life. And to be able to look in the mirror, knowing that with my perilous health condition, I hadn’t got the right to tie someone to me.
I did it in order to not destroy his life and to allow me to have a life of my own.
If he had asked me then, before I read in his eyes the terror of seeing me dying in his arms, I would have found a million things to say; but now, after five years between us, of silence, of nothing, I don’t even know who it is I’m talking to. Is it Jason, the boy I used to know? Funny, sweet and ridiculously sexy? Or is it this shell of a man on the edge of the precipice I have in front of me now?
“There’s nothing you can do for me, apart from keeping your distance,” I tell him coldly, in a determined voice. I’ve never heard this side of myself, but it’s true. Thereisnothing he can do for me but to leave me alone.
“And if…I didn’t feel like doing that?” he asks, getting closer to me, until he whispers in my ear. “If I wasn’t able to do it any more, Alex?” he concludes with a sigh, and I have to beg my heart not to give in to his words, to betray me here and now, and continue to swell in my chest only for him.
