I remember everything ― a Call Me By Your Name short story

PART 2 ― ...the mystery of love

I still dream about that day.

I dreamt about it just last night. I swiftly entered into a cloudy remembrance, but waking up and getting ripped off from it was a grueling torment. I opened my eyes and for a split second I was still inside the dream. I could still feel our hug, but realized it was just the sheets entangling around my arms. I could feel our foreheads brought together, though it was just my face in the pillow. I could feel his hand caressing mine, but it were my muscles tightly holding the quilt. The way the sun combined with my tears and didn't let me see anything once the car disappear was just the way the morning drowsiness blurred my sight. I sat on my bed and felt my being crumble back down to the nasty, paltry reality I was in. Then, in an impulse, an animalistic instinct, an involuntary movement my muscles felt an urgency to take, I opened the closet door right ahead of me, took Billowy carefully out of its sacred convoy and held it. There was still a faint smell of him. Or maybe it was just my mind trying to bring him closer, wherever he was. As I breathed in and out on the fabric, a strange feeling flooded me out of the blue; a presentiment, like my mind suddenly was aware of something beyond and was waiting, alerting my whole body to be ready. But I just let waved that away and sat there, getting stripped of the wonders of my sleep until it was breakfast time.

When he left a year ago I did the same thing with his shirt. The last bit of the cab fell away, I couldn't see anything, my surroundings were too vague, my eyes were too wet, I was drowning and I stood there until a desperate cry hit me suddenly. I sobbed and sobbed and I was alone. No hand on my shoulder and no shoulder to cry on, for Mafalda was probably in the kitchen humming a Neapolitan song, outlandish; my dad was just a ghost spot and his calm voice wasn't here to reach my ears and Oliver was distancing from me at each teardrop that fell.

When the crying stop, my shoulders were burning from the sun and the house freshness greeted my skin pleasantly. I went upstairs, but decided to stop at my mom's room - I stood at the door observing her and for a faint second I could swear she recognized me, as she looked at me inquiringly, silently asking "Why are you crying?", and then smiling kindly as though she already knew the answer. And then she lost herself looking out the window again. I felt the tears coming up once more. I closed the door silently, swiftly startled by the look she gave me, the one that said "I know. I always knew. And I understand. Be brave, mi amore.", all without saying a word. And I felt comforted, after all. I remember her look and what it conveyed everyday, when it gets too hard. Still a brave woman, still fighting to be here even though it's so easy to be lost. I should fight with the same voracity now.

I lost myself through the corridors of the house for a second as though I stood in a unknown place, before shaking my head from the clouds, heading to my bedroom and, just like today, open the closet and search quite desperately for Billowy, like a drowning man craving for air. Getting hold of its bag was like a refreshing gulp of it. Life saving. I cautiously took it out and placed it on my cheek, laid down with it, cried on top of it and then wiped my eyes with its soft material. During the rest of the day I laid there, me and that part of him tightly held in my hands, safe and sacred and heart-warming, until night came and sun rose, until my eyes dried out and my head was a silent void, just inhaling and exhaling on the shirt as though it was his neck that was wrapping me smoothly.

I've been living my life a bit mechanically since he's gone. But some days, eventually, while doing my job or when falling into sleep, I feel an enormous devastating sensation trying to drown me. I got used to it. The relapses. The truth behind the walls I've chose to build around some pieces of my life. In the love matter, mainly. I try to make my faint life choices around the feeble, terrene motto "Life goes on", the one people say to you when you feel your heart dying but need to keep living. "It has to." A part of me will always neglect that, always turn away to accepting this fact and refuse to live completely without him here. But even so, I still find great pleasure in my work, I still go out some nights and I still transcribe music whenever I can. I still visit my summer house every year, in this one being no different, and I lose myself in thoughts around the streets once more, wandering through the memories I know so much.