"What is love in this temporal life, if not just a distraction from the pain that doesn't seem to end."
After losing his best friend to an unexplained suicide, Mateu finds himself left to pick up the pieces with his best friend's younger brother, Fe...
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To ask Ferran if he wanted to meet Momo was easy – to ask Momo if he wanted to meet Ferran was not. I had almost forgotten what was the very thing that drove the both of us apart in the first place. Yet at the same time, Momo had no problem with me seeing Ferran, that we have managed to establish. He just never asked about him, and that made me worried about what he felt.
"What do you think of Ferran?" I asked him.
Momo and I were at his old home in quartiers nords, in the northern part of the city. The part of the city I would only see while I'm on the train leaving or coming into Marseille. It was certainly a different cry from the rest of Marseille. Old modernist apartment blocks towered imposingly above smaller houses with their terracotta roofs, and it was in one of these blocks Momo and his family moved to after their old house was deemed unsafe. It certainly felt different from the rest of Marseille, and I had to admit I felt uneasy stepping into that neighbourhood. It was, to put it politely, not a very pleasant district. It was the kind of place that was home to working class immigrants, and of course, the problems associated with poverty. As we walked from the station to his house, we walked past youths hanging around the side of the street, and women with colourful headscarves walking by hurriedly. Momo had assured me that nothing was going to happen in broad daylight, and with him by my side, I guess I felt a little bit safer.
"That's a bit of a random question now isn't it?" came Momo's reply, finally.
It was only in that moment that I realised the extent that Momo and I have avoided the topic.
"Yeah," I muttered awkwardly.
"Well," he shrugged. "I barely know anything about him."
I shrugged the topic off, since Momo didn't really seem interested in discussing it at the moment. He was on the stove over a pot of semolina, preparing it for his grandmother. He needed to be home that day since he had to take over caregiving duties from his aunt for a while. That was when I realised I barely knew anything about Momo's family, something that I wasn't too proud of. I guess that's why I offered to tag along. I had hoped I could be useful, but Momo seemed fine handling everything by himself. In the end, I just helped him boil some water and do some light cleaning.
Momo introduced me to his grandmother, telling her that I was a very good friend of his. That was the only thing I understood, as he immediately switched to Arabic afterwards. I felt a little weird, but I didn't mind. After all, Momo had told me that she could only speak the most basic of French.
She was mostly confined to a small bedroom now, barely having the energy to get up from the bed to her armchair. I only stood awkwardly in the doorway, smiling at the elderly woman who looked at me with kind eyes. Her skin was wrinkled and she clasped her hands together as she sat on the edge of the bed. The sun shone in from the window, illuminating her face. Momo had told me stories about his childhood, about how his grandmother made the best tea he had ever tasted, and how she was always kind to everyone. I could see that.
