"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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The pots just showed up at my doorstep – the peony with its dramatic flowers in full bloom, the muted camellia with its last blossoms of the year. And of course, the oleanders.
Those dreaded flowers. From Rafel, to Ferran and finally to me. They were like heirlooms to a heavy cloak of death and a sorrow that had no end in sight. I had brought the peonies and the camellias inside to grace my bare balcony, but it was only when Momo nudged me did I bring the oleanders in as well. The flowers stood beside the dwarf lemon tree that we always had, the one that Momo had brought with him when he first came here.
Momo had shown me nothing but concern in the wake of Ferran's death. He was the one who prepared my meals, helped me to arrange for leave from my job and helped me with things around the house. Even in the midst of all that, at least I still had him.
I was on my balcony one evening, watching the sunset. Cigarette on my lips, I breathed in the smoke as I listlessly paced back and forth. The deep, piercing sorrow had begun to give way to a lightheaded emptiness. The numbing, omnipresent emptiness. The toxic smoke in my lungs was the only thing making me feel like I had any semblance of life within me.
It was a senseless loss. He was too young. Far too young. He had a future all ahead of him, everyone could see that. Everyone but him.
I couldn't bear going to his funeral. I couldn't bear seeing the sight of his parents burying another son into the ground. I couldn't bear seeing the pretty lashes on his shut eyes and the cherubic blush applied on his cold, dead cheeks.
I couldn't help but think of his last few moments on this earth. They keep me up as I try to sleep, but the scene keeps playing in my head, again and again. I could see him stumbling from the sofa as he got up, disoriented, his body cramping, his head spinning as the panic started to set in. Knocking over the bottle of wine that he had used to wash down the poison that he had swallowed. As the reality sets in that he truly was going to die.
I couldn't help but think of his last, lonely moments. Gasping for air, clawing away at his neck as his nerves began to fail and his stomach turned itself inside out. Clutching at his crucifix, his calls to me remain unanswered, his empty eyes staring directly to the heavens. As the angel of death reached down to reap his soul from his weathered lips, I wondered what were the final thoughts running through that curious, beautiful mind of his. As the toxins in the oleander finally stopped the muscles in his frail, broken heart, seizing him in one fell swoop into the clutches of death.
It was such a painful way to die.
Ferran had always been obsessed with the beautiful and the dead. In a sense, he embodied it. And ever since his brother died, it seemed to be all that he's ever known.
He truly believed that death was beautiful. And I suppose it was. But death was also candid. In its own grotesque way it captured how he had always been. In his garden of oleanders, he never seemed truly alive.
