friends.. for a little while

I don’t remember the time i had first recognized my face to be the objective representation of myself. I do remember the first time i saw my friend: we lived in the same building, his family’s flat directly six floors beneath ours. We were of the same age, six when we first met. I remember seeing his face for the first time and thinking: “This is what I look like”. Others confirmed the resemblance - we did look alike, for a while. The following year we started going to school: same school, same class for the pair of us. We didn’t sit together, though, because our teacher had the policy of pairing up girls with boys and good students with the not-so-good ones: there were no bad students. We had a good teacher. Both my friend and I ended up with some dumb chicks - for the time being, that is. Later in life i had the chance to share my desk with a few more chicks of various sorts; for my friend, however, the girl our benevolent teacher made him sit with was the only one he would ever come close to in his entire lifetime.

I can't recollect much about him, actually. Apart from the little sentence that flashed through my young mind when i first saw him - this is what I look like - and the fact that he liked basketball while all the other kids preferred soccer (not much basketball courts for 7-year-olds, and quite a lot of soccer fields) i don’t recall anything else about the time before his illness took place. I believe it was half way through the first grade when he suddenly disappeared. All i knew was that he was very sick: i had already made other friends and I quickly turned to them, with a previously unchallenged belief that every illness has a cure. It may take a while, but he will come back.

So he did. We were second graders now and were in a different classroom: the new one was on the third floor. I don’t think he’d been back to school for more than a day or two before he collapsed on the stairway. He didn’t return to the class after that. His father was a teacher, so he gave him lessons at home. My friends and me used to visit him, for a while. It was then we learned that there is such a thing called “brain tumor” and our friend has to have his skull drilled if he’s ever to be rid of it. Later on we discovered that this thing makes him forget stuff: conversations, faces and, as our visits grew more infrequent, even his friends. Eventually, i was the only one who came to the grim apartment on the ground floor of our building to see him, and with every visit the pause between him seeing me and the sparkle of recognition appearing in his eyes grew longer. For a while, he was able to play darts, build lego castles and talk to me. Later on, all we did was watch cartoons. Finally, i wouldn’t come to see him more often than once every few months and i became aware that the look in his eyes did not mean that he recognized me, but that he realized the fact that he should. So he pretended. So i pretended, for a while.

As i was finishing primary school, i used to occasionally see his father taking him out for slow walks in front of our building. I dreaded encountering them, a drained school teacher, looking twenty years older than he really was, and a zombie that used to be my friend, bloated from the heavy drugs and almost completely unaware of the world. I was in high school when he died. I didn’t attend the funeral. Those of us who knew him mentioned him sporadically, usually when we came across someone from his family. We used to say that he’d been a bright boy - a not very bright friend of ours praised him and swore that he took him for a genius those couple of months of school before he got sick. And we’d also say it was a shame that him, his parents and his sister had to suffer so much over eight long years, and that it was surely a relief for everyone when he finally found his peace. As for where he had found his peace, I found out a couple of years ago. My family and i were at a funeral; we made our way towards the grave for an old woman, a relative of ours. As there was no direct path to her burial place, we had to jump between and above other graves (it was a neglected and a very crowded graveyard in the hills outside of town). On one of the tombstones there was a name I recognized; and a face of a boy above it, one I can’t recollect now.


music: “Boatman’s Call” - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
movie: “My Life Without Me” – Isabele Coixet