"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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If there was a defining attribute that I had to choose to describe Ferran, it was how enigmatic he was. He always seemed so far away. He was there, but never truly there. I took it as it was, choosing to only deal with what he had revealed, despite it being rather frustrating.
Summer was drawing to an end, and despite the time we've spent together, there were still so many things that I didn't know about him. He never told me about where he was going for university, and as my time in Perpignan slowly crept towards an end, I simply accepted that perhaps I will never know. I've tried asking him about it before, but he simply shrugged.
We would spend hours together, often just walking, or eating out. I couldn't tell if he enjoyed my company, but certainly if he hated it he would've stopped seeing me. Ferran wasn't much of a talker, but I paid it no mind. Honestly I just wanted to spend the long summer days with someone that wasn't my family. There was a strange comfort being with him in our long pauses of silence. Especially with someone who could understand my pain. Slowly, but surely I managed to put together a more complete picture of the blond boy with arctic blue eyes.
He went to the cathedral down in Perpignan every Sunday for mass, together with his family. I never saw too much of his father, but he appeared to be close with his stepmother. She was a lovely woman with fair brown hair and a warm smile. Ferran told me when he wasn't spending time with me he would be with her instead. Rafel had been close to her too.
Ferran had never really talked about their real mother, and I didn't want to ask. All I knew was that she ran away with Ferran when he was little, and he was never the same since. All that I could piece together of the whole situation was from what little fragments Rafel had told me.
"I didn't even know she was unhappy," Rafel told me as we sat at the beach.
He was wearing his red linen shirt, his top few buttons undone, and a pair of shorts. The morning sun bathed the entire beach in a reddish glow from the east. The summer was beginning to draw to an end, and to celebrate our entrance to adulthood, Rafel had invited me to hang out. He told me it was going to be a long time before we were ever going to see each other again.
And sadly, he was right. If only I knew what was coming, I would've begged him to stay, I would've begged him to just hang on for a little longer. But all I had now were fragments of a distant memory that got further and further away from me with every passing second, with no way of return.
"She was always so calm, so composed in front of us," he continued. "I guess none of us expected her to just pack up and leave. But I suppose she was at her breaking point."
I only nodded.
"I'm still trying to understand," Rafel sighed. "But I don't think I want to anymore. It's really exhausting and I feel like I'm on my last legs, honestly."
I stayed silent.
"So I'm just going to accept that I'll never truly know," he replied.
"You could ask Ferran now, couldn't you?" I said, trying to be helpful. "He was there."
