Chapter Text
Within a perfect dream, I felt the rain
Suddenly as it started pouring
Soaked on through, but I kept on walking
My soul shaking from the cold
And with these hands
I gathered the memories
Though they’re losing color and fading
I held to the hope they could maybe
Patch the hollow of my heart
"Last Stardust" by Aimer, translated by AmaLee
Ivan wakes up. The alarm clock beeps unpleasantly next to his ear. The sun shines brightly, breaking through the thick dark gray curtains. Ivan wakes up, but does not open his eyes. Life has taught him to listen to the world, life has taught him to be careful of the things around him. So he listens without opening his eyes. The alarm clock continues to beep, the sun continues to break through his closed eyelids like a scarlet veil. Today is Thursday, the seventeenth, seven in the morning. The first lesson at college is history. The noise of early cars can be heard outside the window. Ivan still does not open his eyes. Life has taught Ivan to expect danger from the world. However, this is not that world.
So he opens his closed eyelids. The sunlight burns his eyes, the white sheets rustle peacefully as he slowly gets up. The cars continue to make noise outside. The alarm clock continues to beep around his ear. Ivan looks out the window. People are running along the sidewalks. They are rushing about their business, clutching their car keys, talking on the phone. And Ivan feels a nagging, ghostly pain somewhere in his heart. The pain of a bullet striking, the taste of blood on his tongue, fear, despair, painful relief, loneliness, the cold of dripping drops mixed with the heat of bleeding wounds on his body. He feels something he shouldn't feel. He feels something that never happened.
first time he woke up without opening his eyes was three months ago. Three months ago, he woke up for the first time with trembling palms and a maddening pain in his chest. Three months ago, he woke up here for the first time, in a world that was not his, in a world where none of the things that continued to haunt him in nightmares day after day had happened. It was a free world. A place where the sun shone through the windows every morning, a place where he heard the hum of cars and the sounds of street animals every day. He was surrounded by people, he went to college, he studied, then he came home. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. A month later. He was free. Free from the monstrous hands around his neck, free from the raw pain in his throat after hours of agonizing non-stop singing, free from the stares, free from the fear of death, free from the anguish that twisted his insides so tightly he didn't know what to do to stop it. He kept telling himself that he was free. He had to be free. But he kept waking up with the taste of blood on his tongue and a nagging sense of loss. Lost. Because here, in a world surrounded by people, a world where he didn't belong, he continued to be tormented by memories too real to be the fantasy of his sick mind. He continued to yearn for something he couldn't name. A mixture of emotions, a jumble of sensations, pain, despair, relief, affection, fear. And the green eyes that appeared in his dreams, like visions, like a bittersweet paroniria* that gripped his mind. Eyes that made him want to claw his heart out of his chest with his own hands, that made his throat tighten like a vice, that stung his eyes more than the morning sun. Eyes that he nevertheless desperately wanted to keep looking into.
Ivan didn't know what this feeling was. It was too furious to be fear, too desperate to be anger, too warm to be hatred. Too all-encompassing to be any feeling he had ever known. So he continued to wake up every morning to three nonexistent blows to the chest, to phantom sounds of gunshots, and to a feeling of fear mixed with something he couldn't comprehend. He continued to open his eyes, continued to live out his daily routine in a crowd of people, to walk in a world that seemed both familiar and alien to him, only to close his eyes again when darkness fell. To close his eyes and see an emerald gaze looking straight at him, making the cold drops of rain and the familiar pain of a shot to the heart seem less of a problem. If he could see those eyes, he could die and be resurrected a hundred more times.
So Ivan gets out of bed, just like he had for dozens of days. He runs his hand through his dark hair, tangled from sleep, brushes away the aching pain that grips him inside and out, and tries, as usual, to stop the trembling that has taken hold of his body. He always trembles in the morning. This crazy mixture of cold and fear, a tremor that he could never get used to. Ivan carefully chews his breakfast, a mishmash of something bland and salty at the same time. He could barely distinguish between tastes, the texture of the food was indifferent to him, and the feeling of his stomach being full brought him nothing but the realization that he would probably live another day. And he wanted to live. Probably. At least, he was definitely afraid of death.
The street wind ruffles his hair, blows in his face, returning him to a reality he should have gotten used to one day. His legs carry him to college as usual, his eyes see unfamiliar faces that he is used to recognizing. His lips stretch into a smile that does not reach his eyes. He greets people who call themselves his friends and for the first time this morning he hears his own voice. The sound is familiar and at the same time completely alien, Ivan is used to not recognizing his own voice. It was like floating in zero gravity, hovering over a bottomless abyss, a feeling of desperate but familiar uncertainty, loss, alienness.
But he smiles, lets a familiar-unfamiliar hand put a friendly arm around his shoulder. He answers questions, participates in a dialogue, puts words together to form sentences that make no sense to him. The weather, college, girls, the basketball club, the crazy physics teacher. Things so harmless that even three months later Ivan continues to look for a catch in them, continues to peer into the sky as if trying to make sure it is real, he is tense, looking for danger where there is none, does not find it, and this makes him even more tense. And vague nightmares about a reality that never existed do not make the situation better, continuing to torment his already exhausted consciousness. But he continues to smile and put letters together to form words that make no sense. He was free, but he felt like a cornered animal that was released from a slaughterhouse cage into the wild. He didn't feel free, he just kept looking for the familiar shadow of death in the shadows of peacefully rustling trees and the sleepy air of classrooms, only pretending to be free.
Ivan sits down at his desk, rests his chin on his hand, and looks at the clock attached to the wall, peacefully counting down the time. He would like to hear its ticking, but all he hears is the carefree conversations of his “classmates” crowded into the classroom before the start of the lesson. Their “life” makes him feel even more “dead.” And he doesn’t understand whether this is only in a metaphorical sense. He absentmindedly rubs his chest, where, as he remembered, the wounds from the gunshots should burn with a sharp pain, but, naturally, he finds nothing. Ivan doesn’t understand whether it makes sense to attach significance to something as unreal as a blurry shadow of the nightmares from which he seemed to be slowly going mad. However, he couldn’t – and didn’t want to – dismiss this pain as something non-existent. It seemed to him that by dismissing it, he would lose something. Even if that "something" was a vision of emerald green eyes distorted with horror and a twisting, desperate pain in his chest. Especially if it was that.
Ivan blinks at the history teacher's voice and the rustling of textbook pages. He notes with indifferent annoyance that he has once again allowed himself to disconnect from reality, so he straightens his back and begins leafing through his textbook, looking for the right page. He participates in the discussion without much fanaticism, but enough to seem interested. He smiles, without putting anything into it, but enough to seem kind. Out of habit, which seemed to have been ingrained in him by more than one lifetime, trying to appear normal. Even if the meaning of the word "normal" was even further from him than the other reality, fragments of which he saw in his dreams every night.
History. Physics. Lunch. Another hour of lectures. Basketball practice, which left his muscles aching, as if for a moment he were returning to the state of painful tension to which he was strangely accustomed. Ivan did not like pain, but somehow he continued to reach for it, as if the sensation of it were as natural as it was unwanted.
When he goes out into the street, leaving the college gates behind, he notices that the sun has already sunk to the horizon, returning to the street the night that seemed to Ivan cold, dark, uncomfortable, infinitely lonely, but as natural as the feeling of pain following him. So Ivan goes home, with his lips habitually stretched into a smile, waving away the "friends" who invited him to hang out together. The company and alcohol did not amuse him, and the feeling of the musical bass beating on his eardrums brought him only an increasing sense of approaching death, for which he could not explain even to himself.
So he walks home, listening only to the rustle of the asphalt under his feet or the voices of passers-by rushing past, his hands, slightly frozen by the cool evening air, hidden in his pockets. He hears sounds distantly, as if through an invisible barrier of glass, and barely feels the cold, habitually losing the feeling of belonging to his own body with each step. He was a human in the world of people, but he felt like no more than an alien lost in an alien reality. Ivan clenches his palms into fists to feel the pain of his nails digging into his skin, and this gives him a brief sense of life. He exhales and looks up at the street in front of him, peering into the blurry faces of the people around him. His heart squeezes as if with anticipation, as if Ivan was trying, contrary to the voice of reason, to find a familiar face in the crowd, not even knowing what a “familiar face” was. He was looking for something, not even knowing what he was looking for, and this feeling haunted him even more often than the fear of death.
He looks up to meet the translucent stars that stand out in the sunset sky. And something about those stars makes his heart twist in a familiar, painful agony that makes him dizzy. He stares at the stars without blinking, as if, if he could endure the burning in his eyes, he would be able to see in those stars what he seeks, as if those stars could unravel the tangle of his surface emotions, make him feel something deeper than the aching emptiness in his heart that he didn’t know how to hide from.
But in the twinkle of these stars, he sees only the same familiar eyes that appear to him in dreams, which make the aching emptiness in his soul seem to become even more comprehensive. It was like hunger, like a wanting for something he couldn't have, it was like sadness. It was like a lot of emotions he had experienced, but it wasn't them. Therefore, he looks down at the ground, examining the dark dust under his feet.
The apartment greets him with its usual dull silence. Ivan was always alone, in this reality or in the world from his dreams, and in this similarity he found a strange solace. He sits down at his desk, opens his notebook to write a couple of notes for tomorrow. The silence of the room is filled with the creaking of a pen, writing letter by letter on a piece of paper. He does not follow the content of what he has written, but only mechanically performs the task, as he did many days before. He was often called insensitive, cold, machine-like, and he wasn't going to deny it, smiling with his usual smile, which makes his empty eyes seem even more insensitive. One page of the notebook is filled with words. Then another one. Then third one. He wrote until he could no longer hear the voices of passersby outside the window, until his hands began to ache with fatigue, causing pain that brought the usual comfort. And then he goes to bed, not bothering to afford anything even remotely resembling dinner.
And in the dream, he's here again. Raindrops, burning from their icy cold, hit him in the face. His head is strangely empty, but his heart beats against his chest cage like a trapped bird. The night vision scenario was repeated over and over again, like a jammed record. Burning eyes, distant sounds of music beating in the ears, the pounding of the heart, the screeching of the microphone.
He is looked at as a commodity by distorted, monstrous eyes, burning in anticipation, in anticipation of what he knew was death. Whether it was his own or someone else's, he did not know, but the thought that the person standing next to him would be the one who would feel death, in itself seemed scary to him in its unbearability. Ivan was afraid of death, but he was much more afraid of the death of the person next to him. However, he was also afraid to look into his eyes. It was a familiar sensation for this dream: an unbearable mix of fear, pain, desperate acceptance, and something else, complex and heavy, pressing down on his chest like an unbearable burden.
Then he turns around and sees all the same eyes that haunt him in his dreams and in reality. emerald green, a mixture of despair and hopelessness, and something about that sight makes him feel a desire for something. The desire to live, the desire for life, the desire for the future and the desire for the past. Over and over, time after time, he looks into those green eyes and thinks that his fear of death is not as great as this unbearably painful feeling that arises every time he looks into the dimly twinkling stars of those eyes.
Then the sound of gunshots. The familiar pain. The taste of blood on my tongue and another surge of excruciatingly animal fear that makes him want to curl up into a ball and hide in a corner. However, that horror becomes insignificant again when those green eyes stare into his with an unfamiliar but strangely desirable intensity. Then a moment later, death comes, for which there are no regrets. Cold drops. Pain. Darkness.
And the awakening.
And Ivan does not open his eyes again, listening to the slightest noise in the emptiness of his apartment. Today is Friday, the eighteenth, seven in the morning.
Three months and one day in a world that didn't belong to him.