"You're here," I said, taking refuge in the words spilling from my tongue. His warmth. His coldness. His voice. His touch. "You're here."
My hands instinctively moved toward his cheeks.
The skin my fingers brushed against felt intertwined with my own.
"I love you..." I said; my fingers were like the trembling hands of a drunkard. "I love you so much."
He wasn't Tarık.
He was someone else. He was the only person I truly possessed in this life.
I tried to connect the dots between events, but I couldn't.
"W-what are you doing here?" I asked, breathless. But my heart... it knew him with its entire being; my body remembered him. My voice was shaking. Clothed in the utter helplessness of a person forced to collapse to the ground, I was clenching every single muscle in my body to the absolute limit, to the point of death. "W-what are you doing here?"
A lifetime of silence followed.
In that tiny moment, I was astonished by the existence of a massive life. A life I couldn't see, couldn't touch, couldn't smell. A life where everything had been laid down through a thousand agonies, a thousand hardships.
"W-why did it turn out like this?" My fingers kept pressing into his cheeks. With my fingers that seemed to absorb his warmth, with the ache in my heart, with the fire roaring violently in my chest... with everything.
Even the tear slipping through my eyelashes felt heavy.
"This is a terrible place," I said as I drew closer to him; I was longing for his lips. In a moment where I remembered nothing, I believed only the words of my heart. I was longing for his cheeks. I was longing for everything that belonged to him. He was actually the only person I loved in this life. Who was he? His name... how was it that his name kept bypassing me?
He was the only person in this life who made me feel valuable.
I wanted to get closer to him. Even if there was a distance filled with continents and geographies between us, I wanted to cross it, to leave myself incomplete just to complete him. I breathed in until my entire body tensed up, leaving no strength within me. The distance between us grew tranquil. It rolled away like faint, dying ocean waves. When my lips met his, in that moment of terrible agony, we shared a dizzying, intoxicating kiss. While saying "I love you so much..." on one hand, on the other hand, I was aware that I needed to pull my lips away from his.
I wanted us never to part. I wanted nothing to end. I wanted time to remain pinned right there. Like a photograph tacked up with a thumbtack, my youth slipped away before my eyes.
"Why did you do it? I... I..." The word remained buried in my lips. I was like someone caught in the desperate rush for survival. "Who am I? You know," I said, sobbing. My sobs knotted in my throat like a noose. "You know. Y-you know. No one else but you could know..."
Only him.
Only he knew.
The warmth radiating from his lips seeped into my skin. My entire body was groaning.
Right at that moment, I wanted to kill myself, to find a single way out that would rescue me from this world's endless, clamorous chaos, its pain, its sorrows, its injustices, and its betrayals. But what about his scent? Was it binding me to life, or was it breaking the very last ounce of my resistance? I didn't know. The only thing I knew was him. His name. His scent. His skin.
"I will tell you everything," he whispered; his fingers slid gently down my back. We clung to each other as if condemned to a movie with a tragic ending.
The first question that dropped into my mind was, "How much time do we have left?"
"How much time do we have?"
As I pressed my head firmly into the crook of his neck, the agony caused by his fingers wandering through my hair grew sharper. "We have no time," he whispered. The whole world had lowered its voice just so I could listen to him. "I don't know anything," I murmured. "There isn't a single thing I know..."
When my sobs resurfaced, he held me tighter, as if everything was perfectly fine. "I'll tell you everything."
Then he gently pushed me away from him. But simply because he distanced me from himself, I felt at that moment as if I were being yanked backward by a horrific rope. It was as if a knife had been plunged into my back. Those moments that stabbed into my brain over and over again, the moments I was stabbed... they were all like dress rehearsals. My heart was beating as if it were about to stop.
I needed him to tell me.
He had to tell me everything.