"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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How could you possibly honour the memory of someone who doesn't want to be remembered, who doesn't want to be honoured, who wants nothing more than to vanish from the fabric of time? Try as I might, I could never forget him – from his soft golden curls, to his whispery velvet voice, to the smooth, cold touch of his porcelain skin. But especially his eyes, those eyes of arctic blue crowned by long, curly lashes, always so distant, always so faraway.
Ferran had asked me for favours that I could never fulfil, promises that I could never keep. He wanted me to stay, and now he wanted me to forget him. Ferran was asking for the impossible, just like he always had. A part of me thought that perhaps it was because he himself was not of this world.
I tried not to think of him. It was the least I could do to honour his last wish. But it was easier said than done. How could I ever forget someone like that? He was absolutely special. I will never find someone like that ever again.
But I suppose in this ephemeral life, what mattered the most was that I meant something to him, and he meant something to me.
In the wake of his death, all I heard from his family was that he wanted all his possessions to be given away. I suppose he truly wanted to leave as little of a trace as possible for those of us that remained. I never heard from the Dubreuilhs after that. They too, like their dead sons, disappeared from my life like sandcastles swallowed by the waves crashing into the shore.
All I had left from Ferran was the sketch of me that he had given me, back on the beach on that bright summer day – a time that felt so ephemeral and faraway it almost existed in a plane of fantasy on its own – and his dying flowers. I let them waste away in the summer heat as they slowly died from thirst. The summer was long and dry, and the heat suffocating.
The first to go were the camellias, then the peonies followed suit, dropping their flowers as they withered away. The oleanders however seemed like they were on their way out, but one day, breaking the long heat spell, a strong burst of rain blanketed the entire city, drenching my balcony. It didn't take long before the plant revelled in the second chance it was given, its leaves turning deep green again, and erupting into a vivid display of pale pink blossoms. Soon, my apartment was filled with the familiar scent of apricot. But I didn't mind. I didn't mind at all.
Laurier-rose.
I wondered why they called it that. Perhaps it was because it had the hardy strength of the laurel and the delicate beauty of the rose. Power and allure, a deathly combination. Maybe that was why the brothers were so fascinated by it. Maybe when they stared into the soft pink petals and the spearlike leaves, death was staring at them in the eyes, beckoning them slowly over the edge. Lured by a dreamy lull.
Clearly to me the oleanders only had one meaning – death. But I realised, perhaps like the brothers did, that it was nothing to be afraid of. Just like the oleander bushes growing everywhere in the garrigue, from the shrublands amongst the cypresses, to the walls of country houses, to the balconies of apartments facing the sea, so too was death. Death was in the air that we breathed, in the warmth of the sunshine that we felt on our skin, in the mundane, ordinary things that we took for granted. Death wasn't the opposite of life – it was merely the other half of the portrait of our lives.
