Chapter 1
“Sam said he’s leaving”, Jens spoke up after 15 minutes of laying his back on the ground, his fingers playing with Jesper’s. Resting his head on Jens’ rising chest, Jesper replied with a little “uh huh” that was almost too small for Jens to hear. “He looks really happy. I think he’s wanted to leave for a while”, Jens continued, filling the space, like he always did when they talked about unpleasant things. The sound of silence echoing made things go awkward fast.
“Do you want to leave?”, Jesper finally spoke back. Jens knew he’d been listening all along.
“Leaving Alkmaar? No. I don’t think so. Do you?”
Jesper didn’t answer. He shifted closer to Jens to place him a kiss on the lips, before burying his face in his neck for a moment. Maybe that embrace stood for some kinds of ambiguous answer to that question that Jesper was too afraid to confess. Jens didn’t pick up on that. The warmth he felt in Jesper’s arms was always too inexplicable to think of anything else.
Sam left shortly after. The year ended in May and they would have until September to consider leaving or staying, but Sam left as soon as July came on the doorstep, and as soon as he got his Visa done. Jens thought Sam has always wanted to leave. At least that’s what he saw in Sam’s eyes, or in the way he enthusiastically talked about that new city in Italy as if he’s been there for life. Sam never asked Jens nor Jesper if they wanted to come with him. He made it clear that he would want to leave, and he left when the time came. He’s always happy and all smiling, even in team pictures where everyone was supposed to be serious and tense. And Jesper has known Sam long enough to know that there’s no way to be sure if Sam really wanted to leave Alkmaar.
Jesper stayed with Jens for another while in Alkmaar. Long enough for Jens to think that he would stay. Long enough to convince Jens that he definitely would stay.
Jesper didn’t say anything about leaving. Nor did he act like he was leaving. Although he was indeed a bit quieter than usual, Jens saw something in his eyes that he wasn’t sure how to think of.
Jesper didn’t know if he was thinking about Jens at all when he chose to leave.
The feeling of uneasiness increased, throbbing louder and louder inside his chest when Jens ran towards him on the empty pitch the other day, and pulled him into a shoulder kiss. Jesper kissed him back on the lips, which then tasted like the guilt of having hid something for long without ever really intending to say the truth. If he were to kiss him again now, he bet it would still taste the same.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jens whispered into Jesper’s ears, as they laid their backs on the grass. They always stayed on the empty pitch for another extra hour, just to lie their back on the grass staring at the sky while playing with each other’s fingers.
“Mm-hmm”, Jesper placed a kiss on Jens’ palm, “Thinking what?”
“That’s how much I love you. And how much I want to stay here with you.”,
Jens probably was just saying what he had been thinking. He liked to have his thoughts clear and simple, and as clean as the zero unread messages in his inbox. He had always known that he liked being here in Alkmaar, and he liked being in Alkmaar with Jesper. If that wasn’t love, then Jens wouldn’t know what else to answer either. He never thought he would make it all about himself when he said he loved Jesper.
Jesper didn’t respond to that of Jens. Letting go of Jens’ palm, a thrust of guilt began to burn his heart, pounding and suffocating his chest as if those words that Jens had just said was something he had been trying to avoid all this time.
One thing to be unsure of: Jesper didn’t know if he was afraid of “I love you”, or “I want to stay”. All he had ever blamed himself for was how much of a coward he had been to Jens. For all of the meaningless explanations he told Jens while trying to hold back his tears, for every time his heart burnt as Jens looked up to him with the most hurtful gaze that he had ever witnessed in his life. For when Jens didn’t try to stop him in his endless pathetic speeches explaining why he was leaving, and for when Jens only asked him once in the many hours that they sat together for the last time in Alkmaar, “I thought you said you’re staying?”.
Jesper never answered that question. He left Alkmaar and Jens with a farewell kiss that tasted bitter, and a memory of Jens’ back turning to leave the gate as he waved him goodbye at the airport. He’d never seen him so small.
Before boarding, Jesper spent a considerable amount of time typing and deleting texts. It’s funny how sending or not sending a certain message can change or not change everything, or anything. And Jesper meant to ask Jens that if it was the last time ever, would he care enough to tell him to stay.
Jens would have said yes. But if saying so could have changed anything or not, Jesper wouldn’t have found himself on the seat beside the window hours later, crying, lovesick, gone, messed up, broken, fucking disaster.
The first weeks in Bologna were good. Good enough for Jesper to think that he probably had made the right choice. Sam was helpful in every way possible, with the moving and the helping him to get to know the city. Jesper had always heard him yap about how wonderful Bologna was ever since he made his move in July. He remembered how Jens used to be so indifferent hearing about Bologna when they were all on a Skype call together. Back then, he didn’t even think that he would be here one day in late August, wandering around the ancient-looking streets with Sam babbling about how life had been seriously amazing recently.
The streets in Bologna didn’t look like what they were in Alkmaar. Jesper usually went around with Sam and Lewis, whom Jesper soon realized was the sole reason behind Sam’s unnecessary enthusiasm with Bologna lately. Sometimes he would unconsciously glance at the windows on the streets, with Sam and Lewis giggling non-stop to each other about meaningless things that only couples would understand, and secretly admitted to himself that he was looking for Jens. Jesper knew for a solid fact that this was Bologna, almost impossibly and figuratively far away from Alkmaar, and that if it was 11 in the morning, Jens would probably be on the pitch at that time. Sometimes he hated himself for how much details he kept remembering about Jens. And sometimes he hated how his brain always made him think that Jens would be at one of those tables, would look up and would meet his eyes for one more time in this life like that. He had missed him enough on the empty pitch after everyone had left, and the pitch ridiculously reminded him of what he had left behind in Alkmaar so much that he hated himself for being able to form conscious thoughts. Thinking about Jens almost became something automatic, at this point.
Sam still talked to Jens after he moved to Bologna and moved on emotionally, considering how he would spend most of his time doing stupid lovey-dovey bullshits with Lewis instead of reminiscing about Alkmaar. Jesper hated seeing Jens’ messages popping on Sam’s phone, probably because it’d been a while since the last time he had seen it on his own phone. Nothing prevented Jesper from talking to him, but after a while when Jens no longer started a conversation, Jesper stopped too. There was nothing memorable left for them either. The last message they exchanged was when Jesper told Jens that he had landed in Bologna, to which Jens wished him all the best in the future. He thanked him, and he never replied back, and probably never read it either, even though Jens always read all of his messages. So Jesper had enough common sense to take that as a goodbye, which didn’t stop him from growing the habit of obsessively checking his phone every one or two hours to see if anything popped up. Sometimes he would turn on Do not Disturb, or sometimes he just left his phone on the table in Sam’s kitchen to fool himself into thinking that doing so would make something magically appear on the screen. Every time Jesper did that, he knew he was hoping for something specific. That something never happened. From time to time, Jesper understood the signs of someone who didn’t want to hear from him again, or didn’t care if he wanted to hear from them.
The break-up hurt the most when it was silent. Sometimes Jens wished there was at least a closure. He kept replaying the scene on and on in his head, thinking about what signs that he missed, what he didn’t notice about Jesper before he left. For a while, Jens blamed himself for having believed that Jesper would stay. For another while, Jens was mostly angry at how he was treated, probably a betrayal that he felt. He tried to delete Jesper’s photos in his phone and his images in his mind, despite secretly admitting to himself of how childish that was, but doing so really helped him to get rid of the ruminating thoughts for a while. He blamed Jesper for all the mess that he had left behind – including Jens, who spent some of the first days after their break-up finding his will to live with a pair of blood-shot eyes strained with dryness from sleep deprivation and mostly tears. He asked himself the questions he thought he would’ve asked Jesper over and over again if there was any chance. And if there was ever any change, whether in weather or in time, it would have been less painful than the change that occurred in Jesper’s mind, the one that Jens had never even known about.
Sometimes Jens would strike up totally random conversations with Sam, ultimately just to ask how Jesper had been, hoping it was nice where he was. It surely wasn’t nice here in Alkmaar after Jesper had left. And if the sun shone and the day was beautiful, something could remind Jesper to wish that he had stayed.
He never texted Jesper again.
Jens kept telling himself to quit thinking. The thoughts ran around and gave him that vague spark of hope that things would somehow get better, but they never did. Jens never thought they would end like this. And Jens never texted Jesper again.
