Kai• ros | Julian Brandt

19.

There will be a moment in which the world around you becomes silent, the hustle and bustle stops and time slows down. A moment in which you will only care about two simple things. The first one will be your heart. The words it will whisper to you. The language in which it will speak to you. The pace at which it will beat. The second one will also be the heart. A heart belonging to the person you will love. They will be different, but still, they will be a missing part of the other.

The world went silent and time really slowed down. Nothing else mattered, just the two of us.

Every touch, fleeting or passionate kiss. Every word, serious or affectionate. Every tear, whether it was accompanied by loud laughter or suffocating crying. Every sunrise we woke up in our arms and every sunset we fell asleep in each other's arms.

It was like a dream from which I never wanted to wake up.

It made me even happier to realize that Julian felt and experienced the same thing as me.

This short period that started in our lives after the dinner we spent together on Julian's terrace taught me something. It taught me that love, in any of its forms, knows no rules. It is unexpected, unbridled, and the more you fight against it, the more intense it becomes. And that's why we both stopped fighting. We treated ourselves to that little bit of luxury that many people in today's world deny themselves. We decided to feel. To love and be loved. Not just to survive but to live fully.

And maybe the sand in our shared hourglass was falling a little slower, but the one who ruled the world outside our pink bubble wasn't slowing down.

It was fast and relentless. Exactly like the end of the season for BVB.

Anyone who does not know Borussia Dortmund would say that this season has been strange, fluctuating. In many ways illogical and inexplicable. Once, we were riding a winning wave and were touching the leading places in the table with our fingertips, and at another time, we had to drink to the bottom the cup of bitterness that every heavy defeat tasted like. On the world stage, outsiders who were able to beat the giants with ease, and on the domestic stage, professionals, who many times resembled amateurs with their game. However, this is also what Borussia Dortmund is about. It is a club full of paradoxes, senseless and bad decisions, a club that is more in the shadows than in the limelight, but is all the more loved by its supporters and anyone who has been or is still a part of it.

While in the Champions League we were just a step away from its finals, in the Bundesliga we were only able to hold on to fourth place in the fight for the Meisterschale.

After an unlucky draw with Leverkusen, a heavy loss against Leipzig and a surprise first-leg semi-final against PSG at home at Signal Iduna Park, there were very few opportunities left for Borussia to at least redeem their reputation. The Bundesliga was headed for its successful finish and the final three game weekends were upon us. A home game against Augsburg, an away game against Mainz and the whole season was to be finished at Westfalen in a game with Darmstadt. If we managed to draw or maybe even beat PSG in the second match, our season would officially end in June, in London's Wembley, in the very final of the Champions League.

But do you know how they say it? You can have everything you want, but never right away and never all at once.

Dortmund, May, 2024

The beginning of May will probably be hard to forget. It was the day after Julian's twenty-eighth birthday. A day I knew would have to come sooner or later, but my teenage self, the one who wrote down a list of favorite players long ago, naively believed it wouldn't. The third of May marked the day, with the arrival of which began a kind of imaginary end of an era lasting several years in BVB.