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I closed my eyes to shut the memories away.
It didn’t help.
The darkness behind my lids was no refuge.
Instead, it was filled with visions of our time in Prague, the eerie silence of Uncle Igor’s castle, the strange adventures that seemed so thrilling at the time but now felt like haunting premonitions of the fragility of our existence.
And I saw us walking through Uncle Igor’s odd castle, sneaking around in a secret passageway. Max hadn’t wanted to be in Prague at all or even behind those damn walls of that bugged-out castle, but he went because he loved me, because he would always be there.
Max. . .don’t leave me.
Sadness shivered through my body.
Hours later in Prague, X died and side-by-side Max and me chased after masked men, our hands steady as we took aim.
The sharp crack of our gunfire echoing in the air.
Another memory unfolded in my head.
We sat together on Max’s bed, in his room in Italy, bathed in the warm glow of the bedside lamp with the smooth melodies of jazz filling the room. Only Lemonisha served as a witness, but I touched Max’s hand, and he almost had a heart attack.
Shit. . .I almost had a heart attack too.
The memory of touching his hand, the electric shock of connection that we had ran from most of our lives—how could something that felt so vibrant, so alive, be so close to slipping away into the void?
Max. . .don’t go. Please. . .I love you.
Those precious moments we shared were the threads that bound us together.
The love and laughter endured long after the pain faded.
However, those memories were also now shards of glass, piercing through the fabric of my reality, leaving trails of pain. The thought that I might never experience those moments again, that all I would have left were these fragments of the past, was unbearable.
Wrong.
Fucked up in the cruelest ways.
I would rather die first, than to live without you.
As the car hummed along, the cold fear of losing Max, the possibility of his light being snuffed out, wrapped around my heart like ice.
He was more than a friend.
He was my brother.
Part of my soul.
A piece of my very being.
Will he wake up? What if. . .he doesn’t?
Terror—so profound—it shook the very core of my being.
Where do we go when the light fades?
What becomes of our love, the shared moments, the whispered secrets when death calls?
Would they dissolve into nothingness?
