COLORS

COLORS [English]

Translation: I=Theo
Colors. Him=Boris

I.

I remember the day everything changed. The day everything turned to black and all the colors disappeared from my life. The day even my life decided to disappear.

It had been a cloudy day in Amsterdam, and I sat on a rusty bench outside of a coffee shop with a warm coffee in my hand. The bitter taste of the coffee and the chilly wind in Holland made a pretty good mixture and the warm drink transferred slowly down my throat at every gulp.

"Am sorry, it took time."

It was him.

The man I got to know when he was only a boy. A boy with raven black disheveled hair and sad, but tired, dark eyes. I remember how deep his Russian accent was, which made him quite unclear by words, but also how much I loved it.

I met him during a difficult time in my life when everything was gray and sad. My mother had died a year earlier, and I was forced to move in with my father, who I didn't have a very good relationship with, and his girlfriend. They lived in Las Vegas and it was there I met him the first days of school. For the first time in a year, I was finally able to see colors again. The colors stayed every day, and when I was with him the colors got brighter and my vision got clearer. It was exactly like I didn't need my glasses by his side. It felt like we were on another planet. A planet where it only existed one color and that color was him.

"It's okay," and it was. Everything was great.

We sat in a quiet silence on the bench and drank our coffee as we heard the Dutch people around us speak in their language, (we heard a little English here and there, as well as other foreign languages that we were unable to interpret.)

The wind was pretty strong this day, and that caused both of our hairstyles to sweep through the cold air. I pulled my coat closer to my body and felt something warm laid over my exposed hand on the bench, but when I looked down at my hand the warm thing from before was gone and my hand started to slowly get cold again.

I looked at him. His cheeks were a bit redder than before and he had come closer to me during the short time I wasn't looking. I smiled at the thought that maybe the warmth I felt on my hand before might have been his hand.

When we both had drunk up our coffee we decided to walk around Amsterdam's crowded streets as it started to obscure and as the streetlights started to shine to show us the way. We walked on the side of the road and saw how a few cars slowly drove past us. We looked inside a few shops, but we never went inside to buy anything.

We talked as we walked and laughed at his bad jokes. Just being there by his side made me realize how safe I was with him. I was even safe beside him as a fourteen-year-old kid, and I hope he felt the same. Both when he was fifteen years old and right now, as an adult, in Amsterdam.

Our hands were close to each other, and I was very close to trying to take his hand in my own, but before I could react he pushed me away. I heard a swooshing sound, a crash and he wasn't in front of me anymore. The swooshing sound had been a car and the crash had been the car crashing into one of the stores' display windows on the street. People screamed and many of them had gathered around something on the street. Worried discussions in foreign languages gathered around the crowd.

I saw someone stumble out from the broken display window. My head was spinning and I was looking after him, but he wasn't anywhere to be seen. I decided to see who it was that was stumbling out of the display window. It was the driver who crashed the car that stumbled out. He met my gaze with a blood-filled face and puffy eyes. He looked furious.

"Ga de fuck weg van mijn buurt, faggots!" screamed the driver to me in Dutch, which made all of the other people turn their attention to us instead of the thing that was on the ground. "Get the fuck out of my town, faggots!" and the driver ran away as I could hear sirens from police cars getting closer.

I continued my hunt after him, and I found him at the place I least wanted to. It was him the Dutch people were looking at. It was him down there on the ground.

I pushed away the people from him and looked down at his numb body. His face was bloody and the disheveled hair looked rigidly and lifeless. His black coat had been destroyed and his legs laid stretched out in uncomfortable ways. 'They were broken' a nurse would tell me just a few hours later.

I sat down on the cold stone ground. I saw how he fought just to breathe and how blood started to ooze out of his mouth. I started to see a gray color form by the sides of my eyes, and I knew exactly what was about to happen. I yelled out his name the whole time while I ensured him that help was on the way and that he was gonna make it, as the gray color started to fog more and more in front of my eyes.

He said my name, which made me go quiet and stare down at his still face. Our eyes met and I could see tears beginning to form in his eyes. I was crying myself, which made the glasses on my nose starting to fog up.

"There's something important I have to tell you," he said quietly as he began to move his hand, which was the closest to me, slowly forward.

All color was almost gone from my vision now and that made the wait for what he was gonna say so much sadder.

"YA lyublyu tebya," was the last thing I heard him say. At the same time, he laid his hand on top of mine. I felt how the warmth in his hand slowly started to fade away and at the same time, I saw all of the colors in my eyes dissolve the same as his last breath.

II.

It was that day I lost my life, because he was the one who was my whole life. If it wasn't because of him, all my days would be just as gray as when I was looking out at something now. Sitting at a desk in a hotel room in Amsterdam, where everything still smelled like him. The bed he slept in, his clothes that were laying on the floor, even the bathroom still had the strong fragrance of his perfume.

Everything felt so empty at the moment. My vision was blurry and I had an enormous headache from all the crying. I barely cried. I barely cried anything when my mother died either, but when it came to him, I couldn't stop.

I found one of his old hoodies by his suitcase on the floor and without hesitation I had already put it on. I was drowning in it, but somehow I could still feel the safe feeling from him around my body. I smelled it, just to sense his scent again. A tear slid down from my eye and caressed my cheek. Just the thought of never getting to experience that scent from him again took a lot on me.

I couldn't stop thinking about him. Everything from his dark beautiful eyes, to his raven black hair, his narrow lips and to his skinny body.

The memories were strong, and without me even knowing it had the memories from the road began to run through my head again. To see him there on the ground again made me feel sick. The bloody face and the broken legs. Everything was stuck in my head, the same as the last thing he was ever gonna say to me.

"YA lyublyu tebya."

It was Russian, and it meant one of the easiest words in the world. It was a sentence that people told each other almost all the time. Mothers and fathers to their children, friends could say it to one another, people who were in love and mostly it was with married people.

My Russian was rusty after I hadn't used it for many years. He had taught me a bunch of words and after that, I decided that I wanted to learn it myself. The last words he said, was one of the easiest things to say, but my sluggish brain couldn't make it out at that moment. I regret more than anything that I didn't say it back to him as he was about to disappear from this world.

It of course meant, "I love you."

WORDS: 1532
WRITTEN: 26/9-19