alis ⟡

The knock on the door came after two in the morning, three spaced-out taps you barely hear over the telly being on some random channel you stopped paying attention to hours ago, eyes glazed over at nothing while the sofa sinks under your weight and the cold coffee mug on the coffee table's already left one of those brown rings you'll have to scrub off later (if it ever matters cleaning anything ever again).

No one came looking for you at that hour, no one could come looking for you anymore, not since the missing poster got taken down from the lamppost on the corner because "it's been a while, love, we need to move on", not since you stopped answering his mum's calls because hearing her cry made you want to vomit from guilt, and for a second you think about ignoring it, about letting whoever it is knock until they give up and go away, but your feet are already moving on their own across the rough hallway carpet, the robot vacuum's strap catching on your middle finger and you nearly fall, swear quietly in a voice that doesn't sound like yours, reach the door with sweaty hands and a heart beating so deep in your chest it seems to echo through the empty flat.

You look through the peephole and the whole world seems to pull the rug out from under your feet because it's Bobby, not just any Bobby but the Bobby, way too thin and way too pale with the "End Apartheid" shirt you gave him in the second month of dating now torn at the shoulder and stained with something dark that could be dirt or could be dried blood, greasy hair stuck to his forehead like he's just climbed out from underwater, eyes sunken and red with bags so deep they look painted on, and he's standing there on the landing of your building's staircase like he's just appeared out of nowhere, no car, no backpack, nothing but his own bruised body and a look of desperation you'd never seen before, the kind of desperation that wouldn't even be capable of screaming anymore.

You open the door without remembering unlocking it, without remembering turning the key, and he's there so close you can smell him, a strange smell of damp and sweat and something that reminds you of the bottom of a basement no one's set foot in for years, and your throat closes up because part of you was still hoping it was a mistake, that the poster was wrong, that he'd just disappeared for a while and would come back like nothing had happened, but the truth is you'd already given up, you'd already cried every tear you could cry and then stopped because crying didn't bring him back and also because, deep down in that dirty, selfish place you wouldn't even tell your therapist about, there was a little voice whispering that maybe it was better this way, that maybe you were free, that maybe now you could finally end things without having to actually end them, and that little voice is now silenced because he's alive and he's here and he's looking at you like you're the only thing in his world.

"Hi," Bobby says, and his voice comes out hoarse and small and cracked in the middle like every letter costs him a piece of his throat, and he tries to smile but the smile is a strange twitch at the corner of his mouth, and he says "hi" again like he doesn't know what else to say, like he rehearsed this for days or weeks or months in the dark of that yellow place and now all the words have run away.

He takes a step forward and falters, his right hand slapping against the doorframe with a dry sound that makes you jump, and he holds on there like the world's tilted and he'd fall if he let go, and you see his fingers — the fingers that used to doodle on your shoulder when you watched films on the sofa, the fingers that used to squeeze yours when you were nervous — they're now caked with dark dirt under broken nails, with little cuts on the knuckles that look infected, and you feel your stomach turn not just from disgust but from something that feels like anger but isn't quite anger, it feels like frustration, feels like injustice because you'd already decided, you'd already prepared yourself, you'd rehearsed your speech in the shower and in front of the mirror and in the sleepless early hours, and now he's here all broken and vulnerable and asking without asking, just with that look of a hurt dog that makes you want to hit him and hug him at the same time.

"Can you let me in?" he asks, and his voice falters in the middle of the last word like he already knows the answer and is scared of it, and you think about closing the door, think about saying no, think about saying "Bobby, we need to talk, there's so much I needed to tell you before you disappeared", but the words won't come and your hands won't obey either and you step back making space for him to come in without even having decided to do it, your body moving on its own while your head screams this is a mistake, this is a mistake, you don't owe him anything but it's too late because he's inside your flat, crossing the living room you haven't tidied for weeks with a strange way of moving like he's forgotten how to walk in a straight line, his wobbly legs knocking against the corner of the table and knocking over a pile of bills you haven't paid, and he doesn't even apologise, just keeps going toward the sofa like he already knows where the furniture is, like he dreamed about this place every night in the yellow hell and is now following a map etched into his soul.

He sits down slowly, so slowly he looks like an old man, and when his back finally hits the cushions he lets out a sound that's a deep, tired noise from his chest like he's been holding his breath since he fell into that hole and only now has permission to let the air out, and you stand there in the middle of the room looking at him with your arms crossed and your jaw clenched, trying not to remember the last time he sat on that sofa, trying not to remember that's where he said "you're being dramatic" when you tried to talk about how lonely you'd been feeling, that's where he turned his back and picked up his camera and started laughing about how good the footage with his mates had turned out while you swallowed your tears alone in the bathroom, that's where you swore to yourself you were going to end it, that you deserved more, that you weren't going to spend another year being treated like a supporting character in someone else's life who barely noticed you existed.

Now he's here again, but different, so different it hurts, and you don't know if this Bobby is the same one who hurt you or if the hole took that Bobby away and gave you back a different one, and that doubt is worse than any certainty because if he's the same then you need to end it, need to be brave, need to say the words you swallowed for so long, but if he's not the same — if he's really changed, if the fear of death made him see what he lost — then ending it now would be Cruelty with a capital C, would be kicking a dog that just got hit by a car, and you're not that kind of person, you never were, but you've also never been in this position before, never had to choose between your own happiness and the sanity of someone you once loved.

He lifts his hurt hand with trembling fingers, and makes a small gesture for you to come closer, and your feet move before you can think, and suddenly you're sitting next to him on the sofa, so close his leg touches yours, so close you can feel the strange heat of his body mixed with that smell of damp and dirt, and he doesn't say anything, just tilts his head slowly until his forehead rests on your shoulder, and you feel his weight, the weight of everything, of every day he spent lost, of every time he must have thought about you, of every promise he made to himself that he'd be better if he got out alive; and your hand rises on its own, your fingers sinking into his dirty hair without your permission, and you want to believe this gesture is affection but you know it's not, you know it's guilt, you know it's fear, you know it's the same dirty part of you that felt relieved when he disappeared now trying to make up for it so you don't feel like a monster.

"I thought about you," he mumbles against your shoulder, "where I was I thought about you, about how much of an idiot I was, about how you deserved more, about how I didn't tell you I loved you the last time we saw each other because we'd argued because I was being a prick and then I ended up in that hole and thought I'd never get to say it again," and the words all come out run together, without pause, like he's been saving up this speech for weeks and now needs to vomit it out before the chance passes, and every word is a punch to your stomach because you remember that last argument, remember every detail, remember you had your coat on ready to leave and he didn't even get up from his chair, remember you said "Bobby, I can't live like this anymore" and he answered "then don't", and you left slamming the door and swore you weren't coming back, that you'd put his things in a box, that you'd change your number and disappear from his life like he disappeared from yours long before the hole swallowed him.

But you didn't do any of that because by the next morning he'd already vanished, because Clark rang desperate asking if you'd seen Bobby, because the police showed up at your door with photos and questions and a look of "another young one disappeared without explanation", and you stood there with the box of his things in the middle of the living room waiting for the right moment to give it back and the right moment never came because the grief came first, because the guilt came first, because everyone started treating you like the grieving girlfriend before its time and you let them because it was easier than admitting that the two of you had already finished long before he disappeared.

Now he's here, alive, saying he loves you with a wobbly voice, and you can't say anything because the truth — the rotten, ugly truth you swept under the rug of grief — is that you didn't miss the Bobby who left, you missed someone, you missed not being alone, but not him specifically, not that 22-year-old lad who made jokes at the wrong time and forgot your things and made you feel like you were always the last priority on his list, and the worst, the worst of it all, is that you caught yourself thinking, in the darkest nights of grief, that maybe it was better this way, that maybe you could finally start over without needing to have the difficult conversation, that the universe had done the dirty work for you, and that thought ate away at you from the inside, made you cry with disgust at yourself, made you drink alone in the dark kitchen while repeating "I'm not a bad person, I'm not a bad person" like a mantra that didn't work.

He lifts his head from your shoulder and looks at you with red, watery eyes and asks:

"did you miss me?" and the question is so simple, so direct, so full of a vulnerability that the old Bobby would never have allowed himself to show.

Your answer gets stuck in your throat like a bone, and the silence stretches on for too long, for seconds that turn into an eternity, and you see his face change slowly, see the hope dying in his eyes in slow motion, and when you finally manage to open your mouth to lie — because lying would be easier, because lying would be kinder, because lying would let him sleep in peace tonight — he shakes his head like he already knew, like the answer's been written on your face since the moment he knocked on the door, and he whispers: "it's alright, I get it, I deserve it", and looks away at the floor of your messy flat, and what hurts isn't seeing him sad, what hurts is realising that part of you — a part you hate, a part you want to tear out with your fingernails — feels relieved that he finally understood.

You stand up first, not out of your own will but because the silence after that "I deserve it" got too heavy like the air in the flat had turned to water and you needed to move so you wouldn't drown, so you reach your hand out to him without thinking, without planning, and Bobby looks at your open palm with an expression that hurts it's so vulnerable, his red eyes glistening in the middle of the room dimly lit by the kitchen light you forgot to turn off hours ago, and he hesitates for a second that feels like a whole lifetime before placing his cold, hurt fingers on yours, the touch so light it barely exists, like he's scared of squeezing too hard and breaking something or maybe like he thinks you're a ghost who'll disappear if he holds on too tight.

"Come on," you say, and the word comes out drier than you meant, like you're talking to a stranger on the street and not the boyfriend who came back from the dead, but you can't adjust your tone now, can't fake sweetness when your head's still spinning with all the things left unsaid, all the arguments left hanging, so you just pull him up off the sofa with a sharp movement that makes him groan quietly — somewhere in his shoulder, maybe his back, maybe some bruise you can't see under the torn shirt — and you feel a pang of guilt, but it's a tired guilt, the kind that doesn't really hurt anymore, just weighs you down.

"You need a shower," you say, not a suggestion.

Bobby agrees with a nod so weak it looks like his neck can barely hold up his own skull, his eyes fixed on some point beyond your shoulder like he's still half trapped in that yellow place, half floating between the world of the living and something else he can't quite name.

The walk to the bathroom is short but feels like it takes an hour, every step Bobby takes dragging and uncertain, his hand gripping yours with a strength that contradicts the fragility of the rest of his body, and you notice he's looking at everything — at the narrow hallway of the flat you used to share before the disappearance, at the photo frames on the wall you couldn't bring yourself to take down, at the half-open bedroom door showing the messy bed where you slept alone for so many nights — and every thing he sees seems to hurt in a different way, like he's redrawing the map of a place that was once his and now doesn't know if it still is.

You turn on the shower before letting him into the small, damp bathroom, the water taking ages to heat up because the building's old and the heater's always been rubbish, and while you wait you stand there in the middle of the shower stall with your hand under the cold water feeling the drips run between your fingers, and it's funny because at some point in your life taking a shower was such an automatic thing you didn't even think about it, and now every second feels stretched out by the awareness that Bobby is there behind you, leaning against the bathroom wall with his eyes closed, breathing deeply like the steam from the hot water is the first good thing to touch his skin in weeks.

You turn around and start taking his clothes off without asking, without ceremony, your fingers pulling the "End Apartheid" shirt over his head, what was once your gift now unrecognisable, torn and stained and smelling of damp, and when the fabric falls from his shoulders, you have to bite your tongue to stop yourself making any sound because Bobby's body — the body you knew so well, you touched and kissed and pressed against your own on nights when you pretended to love each other — is covered in marks that weren't there before, purple and yellow bruises scattered across his ribs and arms, long red scratches running from his wrist to his elbow like something tried to grab him and not let go, and on his right shoulder a round wound that looks like a burn but not quite, the skin wrinkled and pale like it was pressed against something very hot or very cold or very wrong, and you don't ask what happened, not yet, because you're scared of the answer and also because part of you — that selfish part you're trying very hard to ignore — doesn't want to know the details, wants to keep believing that the Bobby who disappeared was just a mediocre boyfriend who vanished by accident, not a tragic hero who survived unimaginable horrors and now deserves all the love and patience in the world.

You take off the rest of his clothes with your eyes down, focusing on the movements of your hands so you don't have to look at the marks, so you don't have to look at his face which is pale and tired and so different from the lad who used to laugh about his boss's misfortunes at the furniture shop, and when he's completely naked in front of you, shivering a little, looking away at the blueish bathroom wall, you say:

"Get in."

The word comes out more steady than you feel, and he steps into the water without complaining, without making a joke, and the absence of his dry humour hurts in a way you didn't expect because the Bobby you knew would have made some stupid comment by now, would have said something like "didn't know you had a thing for assisted bathing" with that crooked smile that was irritating and charming at the same time, but this Bobby just stands still under the hot water with his shoulders slumped and his head down, the water running through his greasy hair and washing away a layer of dirt and sweat and maybe blood, forming a brown circle in the shower drain that goes down slowly making a choking sound, and you watch him for a few seconds before sighing deeply, pulling off your own hoodie and pyjama bottoms and stepping into the shower behind him, because there's no way to wash him properly without getting wet and also because — you admit to yourself with a bitterness in your mouth — because part of you wants to be close, wants to feel the warmth of his body against yours even if it's only for a few minutes, even if it's just to remember what it's like not to be alone.

You soap his shoulders first, running the liquid soap slowly, making circles on his bruised skin with a gentleness that surprises you because this isn't how you imagined touching him again, not after everything, but your hands seem to have forgotten the anger and only remembered how to care, and Bobby stays still under your hands like a frightened animal that doesn't know if the touch will hurt or comfort, his breath coming out in little spasms every time you go over a bruise, and you feel it when he finally relaxes a bit, his shoulders dropping a few centimetres, his head tilting back against your chest without warning, and you let him, keep soaping his chest and his arms and his hands.

When you reach his ribs where the scratches are deepest he makes a quiet sound, and you feel your own eyes sting because it's so unfair, so deeply unfair, that you have to give your boyfriend a shower — the boyfriend you were planning to dump — like he's a sick child, that you have to pretend everything's normal when the only thing you want to do is shake him by the shoulders and scream you treated me badly, you made me feel so small, you made me believe I didn't deserve anything better, and now you come back all bruised and sorry and I can't hate you because that would be too cruel, because everyone's going to look at you like a hero who survived and if I leave you now I'm the villain of the story, I'm the girlfriend who abandoned her traumatised boyfriend, I'm the monster.

"What happened down there?" you asked, your voice coming out harsher than you meant.

Bobby takes so long to answer that you think he's not going to answer, that he'll pretend he didn't hear or that he's too tired to talk, but then he turns his head slightly, just enough for you to see his profile.

"You won't believe it."

His voice is so small, so tired, that you almost give up asking again.

"Try me," you answer, soaping his back in circular motions.

He sighs deeply before he starts talking, and while the words come out — about the rooms, about the rope that wouldn't let go, about the knot that pulled tighter and tighter while he tried to free himself — you remember last summer before the disappearance, Bobby came home late after "helping Clark with something" and you asked where he'd been.

"I told you, at work."

His bored voice meant you're being annoying, stop asking, but you pushed because his phone was off and Clark had said he hadn't seen him all day.

"Stop interrogating me, for God's sake. I don't have to account for every step I take."

He shouted, and you remember the sound echoing through the walls of the small flat, remember the bedroom door slamming so hard the picture frame fell off the wall and the glass broke, remember spending the whole night picking up the shards off the living room floor while he slept like nothing had happened. The next morning he apologised with that smile you loved and you accepted like you always accepted because it was easier than fighting again, easier than admitting it hurt, easier than accepting you deserved more than crumbs of attention and outbursts of anger.

Now he's here, under the shower, telling you about how he felt something grab his ankle while he tried to climb back up, and you listen to every word with a dry mouth and a tight heart, but at the same time a dissociated part of your brain is comparing this vulnerable, sorry Bobby with the Bobby who called you "dramatic" when you said you'd been feeling depressed, with the Bobby who laughed when you suggested couples therapy.

"If you're not happy, no one's keeping you here."

You remember that Friday night, him playing video games without even looking at your face while you cried in the bathroom.

He talks about the yellow place, about the endless hallways and the lights that don't flicker but also never turn off, about the things that move in the dark of the side rooms and how he learned to walk in silence, to hold his breath, to not make a sound even when the despair squeezed his chest, and while he talks you rinse his hair carefully, running your fingers through the wet strands to get all the dirt out, and he shivers under your hands.

"I thought I was going to die alone," he says, his voice starting to crack. "On some random Wednesday, with no one knowing where I was."

His voice finally breaks and he starts crying, ugly and convulsive, shaking his whole body, sobs that seem to tear at his throat.

"Came back for you," he murmurs against your shoulder between one sob and the next, the words wet and jumbled. "Thought about you all the time, about how badly I treated you, about how much of an idiot I was, about how you deserved someone better. And I swore that if I got out of that place I was going to be better… that I was going to deserve you."

Every word is a knife in your ribs because you wanted to hear this six months ago, a year ago, long before he ended up in that yellow hole, you wanted him to wake up and realise he was losing you, but not like this, not with the weight of a near-death experience on his back, because now you'll never know if he's really changed or if he's just clinging to you like a shipwrecked sailor clings to a plank hoping not to drown again.

You don't answer, don't know what to answer, just keep rinsing his hair and running your fingers along the back of his neck with a tenderness that isn't exactly genuine but also isn't completely fake, it's somewhere in the middle, in the grey area where everything in this relationship seems to have lived from the start.

When the water finally runs clean from his hair, you turn off the shower and get out first, grab the fluffy towel that was hanging on the door and wrap him in it like he's a child, drying his arms and his back and his hair with gentle movements while he stands there shivering, his eyes red and swollen from crying so much, and you notice he doesn't try to touch you back — doesn't pull you close, doesn't grab your waist, doesn't do any of the gestures the old Bobby would have done in a moment of intimacy like this — and you don't know if this is respect or fear or exhaustion, but you're silently grateful because if he tried anything now, if he tilted his face to kiss you, you don't know if you'd be able to push him away or if you'd just let it happen out of guilt, out of pity, out of that desperate need to feel something that isn't this suffocating mess of love and anger and relief and regret.

"Let's sleep," you say, reaching your hand out to him with a small smile on your face.

He nods, takes your hand, and follows you to the bedroom dragging his bare feet on the cold floor, and when you turn on the bedside lamp — because you know, without needing to ask, that he won't be able to sleep in the dark, not after spending weeks or months or god knows how long in that place where the only light was that sick, eternal light — he lets out a sigh so deep, so heavy with gratitude, that you feel your eyes sting again, and you hate yourself a little for it, for being so weak, for still feeling something for someone who treated you so badly for so long.

You lie down side by side, you with your back to him at first because you can't face his face right now, can't look him in the eyes and pretend everything's fine, but he doesn't complain, doesn't ask you to turn around, just lies there breathing slowly on the other side of the bed like he's scared of taking up too much space, scared of touching without permission, and this new caution in him is so strange and so sad that you end up turning over after a few minutes, turning to face him and pulling his arm until he's wrapped around you, his face buried in your neck, his warm, uneven breath against your skin.

One of your hands rises on its own to stroke his damp hair while the other rests on his back, feeling the scratches and bruises under your fingertips, and you realise you're doing exactly what you've always done — looking after him, calming him down, putting his needs above your own — and a small, fierce part inside your chest wants to scream, wants to say why is it always you? why am I here comforting you when you spent months ignoring me, putting me down, making me feel like I wasn't important enough even for a proper conversation? but your mouth doesn't move, doesn't make a sound, and the silence stretches out between you like a third person in the bed, heavy and uncomfortable.

"Will you stay?" he asks after a long time, his voice so low it sounds like a thought spoken out loud.

You don't know if he means will you stay with me now, tonight or will you stay with me forever, after everything, but either way the answer that comes out of your mouth is the same because you still haven't learned to say no to him, still haven't learned to prioritise your own pain over his.

"I will."

You whisper against the top of his head, and you feel his body relax immediately against yours, his shoulders dropping, his breath starting to steady, and you lie there staring at the bedroom ceiling with your eyes open in the yellow dimness of the lamp, listening to his heartbeat against your chest and your own heart beating in a completely different rhythm, like the two of you are no longer in sync, like maybe you never were.

The clock on the wall shows half two, three, half three.

You realise you don't have to decide anything right now, that you can put it off, that you can push this decision further and further until you yourself become unsustainable; you close your eyes finally, and the sun's already high, but the room stays dark because of the drawn curtains, those curtains you bought in your first month living alone, before Bobby moved in, when you still liked waking up to the morning light coming through the gaps. Bobby's lying on his stomach in bed, his face turned toward your side, his arm stretched out to where you were before like he tried to reach you while he was sleeping and couldn't.

You sit on the edge of the bed, slowly, so you don't wake him, and watch his face, the dark bags under his eyes that look painted on, the pale skin that's lost the tan of someone who worked at the shop and ran off to uni meetings, his jaw more defined because he lost weight in the yellow place, his cracked lips that you put Vaseline on last night without him noticing, and you think he looks older now, something in him has gone and not come back, something that might have been that ability he had to not take anything seriously, which was annoying most of the time but was also part of him, the part that made you laugh when you didn't want to laugh. Now he looks like every day in the Backrooms hell left a brick on his back, and you wonder if he'll recover, if one day he'll go back to making crap jokes at breakfast, if one day he'll forget enough to be able to sleep in the dark again, and the answer that comes doesn't exist, because no one knows, because trauma isn't a broken leg where the doctor says "six weeks and you'll be fine", trauma's a guest that moves into your house and decides when it's leaving (if it ever does).

You're so focused on his face that you don't notice the change in his breathing until he starts to move, first a small tremor in the fingers stretched out on the sheet, then a sharper movement in his leg, like he's trying to run in his sleep.

"No," he murmurs. "No, no, no, no..."

You reach out your hand to touch his shoulder, but he thrashes so hard your hand slips, and he turns onto his back suddenly, his arms coming up like he's trying to protect himself from something, and you hear your name, and it breaks something inside you, something you didn't know was still intact.

"Run," he whispers, and now his voice is louder, and his hands clench into fists by his sides like he's getting ready to fight. "Run, run, don't look back, run for God's sake, run..."

You stay sitting on the edge of the bed, your hand hovering halfway to his shoulder, and you listen to him beg you to run while he sleeps, and you understand that at some point in the Backrooms, he saw you, maybe in every room you were there, and in every one he was trying to save you, except you didn't ask to be saved, didn't ask to be the reason he keeps fighting, didn't ask to be the centre of anyone's universe, especially not his, especially not now, when you already had your bags packed to leave before he even ended up there.

"Run, go, I'll hold him, I'll hold him, just run..."

You finally find the strength to touch his shoulder, to shake him gently at first, then harder when he doesn't respond, and his eyes snap open with dilated pupils, his chest rising and falling in uneven waves, and it takes him a few seconds to understand where he is, to understand that you're here, alive, whole.

"You're here," he says, his voice cracking in the middle.

"I'm here," you answer, giving a small smile while stroking his face. "It's okay, we're home."

He sits up in bed suddenly, and his arms grab you, his fingers digging into your back like he's scared you'll dissolve into the air, and he buries his face in your neck and breathes deeply.

"It felt so real," he murmurs.

"It was just a nightmare," you say, and the words are empty, they're the words everyone says, the words that mean nothing, because you know that for him it isn't "just" anything, that the line between nightmare and reality is so blurred now that he probably can't even tell the difference anymore, that he'll wake up every day for weeks or months or years not knowing if he's back in the real world or if he's still trapped in that place, and you don't know if you have the patience for that, don't know if you have the strength for that, and just thinking about it makes you feel exhausted, makes you feel that deep tiredness that sleep doesn't fix, that only leaving would fix.

You hold him until the tremors stop, until his breathing returns to an almost normal rhythm, your fingers making circles on his back while he calms down and his body relaxes against yours, and you go back to that night, two weeks ago, when you still thought he was dead, when you were sitting on the same living room sofa with a glass of wine in your hand and absolute silence inside the flat, and you caught yourself thinking for the first time in two years, I don't feel guilty about being alone, and the thought scared you so much you nearly fell off the sofa, because you realised that his absence wasn't a hole in your life, but a relief.

You could go to bed without having to wait for him to finish gaming, could cook what you wanted without hearing complaints about the food, could watch the films he hated without having to negotiate for the remote, could exist in your own space without being treated like a piece of furniture, and the worst, the worst of it all, is that you didn't miss talking to him, didn't miss touching him, didn't miss absolutely anything except the idea of what you could have been, and that idea had been dead for a long time, buried under all the arguments and all the silences and all the times he made you feel small.

You wanted him to stay missing.

The thought comes now, in bed, while he shudders against your chest, while the smell of his freshly washed hair rises and you can't pretend you didn't think it, can't hate yourself enough to erase it. You wanted him to stay missing, and the guilt of that desire is eating away at everything inside you, because how can you wish for someone to disappear? How can you look at him, all broken and hurt and dependent like a newborn baby, and think I'd rather you were dead? What kind of monster does that? What kind of person sits in their own bed with their boyfriend who survived hell and wishes, in the darkest depths of their heart, that he hadn't come back? But you can't lie to yourself.

He lifts his face and looks at you with eyes still watery, and asks: "Are you okay?"

Even though he's just woken up from a nightmare where you died, even with his hands still trembling, he asks if you're okay, and that breaks something because you wanted him to ask that before, wanted him to look at you before with that same concern, wanted him to notice before that you were drowning in silence while he lived his life like you were just part of the scenery.

"I'm okay," you lie.

He looks like he wants to say something, but you get up before he can speak.

"It's getting light, you need to eat something," you say without turning to him. "You're too thin."

"You don't have to look after me," he answers. "I know you're not obligated."

Of course you're not obligated, and yet here you are, making coffee, giving showers, holding hands, lying about staying, because the alternative — leaving him alone, abandoning him when he's at rock bottom — is so unbearable to imagine that you'd rather be unhappy yourself than carry the weight of knowing he fell apart because you left.

"I'll make a sandwich," you say, and you leave the room without waiting for an answer, without looking back, and in the kitchen you lean against the sink and breathe deeply several times, trying to hold back the wave of nausea rising in your throat.

You open the fridge, take out the cheese, the ham, the bread, start making the sandwich, hear his footsteps in the hallway before you see him, and when he appears in the kitchen doorway, he's wearing an old, baggy shirt he always liked to wear, and the blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

"You don't have to do this," he says, looking at the sandwich you're making.

"I know I don't have to," you answer, and the laugh that comes out is bitter, so bitter it even surprises you. "But I'm going to do it anyway. It's what I do, isn't it? I look after you, even when I shouldn't."

You finish the sandwich, cut it in half, put it on a plate and push it toward him.

"Eat," you say. "Please."

He sits in the same chair as before, takes the sandwich with trembling hands, and you watch him eat like you're watching a documentary about the life of someone you don't know anymore.

"I'm so sorry," he says between bites, and the phrase is so repeated now that it's lost all meaning, become just a set of sounds his mouth makes when he doesn't know what else to say.

"Stop apologising," you answer, exasperated. "Sorry doesn't fix anything. You've said sorry a million times in the last twenty-four hours, saying it more won't make a difference."

"Then what do I do?" he asks. "Tell me what to do and I'll do it. Anything. I swear."

You think about what you'd say if you were being honest, if you didn't have to walk on eggshells.

You leave me alone, is what you want to say. You disappear from my life like I'd already decided you would. You give me the breakup I didn't have the courage to ask for and the disappearance I didn't have the courage to wish for.

But the words that come out are different.

"You start therapy," you state. "You deal with the nightmares. You learn to sleep alone. You find a job, any job, and you start building a life that doesn't depend on me to exist."

"And us?" he asks, and his voice cracks in the middle of the word. "What happens to us?"

Nothing, you think. We were already finished before you ended up in that hole. We just forgot to tell each other.

"I don't know," you say out loud, and that's the truth, the only truth you have the courage to admit. "I don't know what happens to us, Bobby. I just know that I can't be the only thing holding you together, because if I am, and if one day I decide to leave... you won't have anything left. And I don't want to be responsible for that."

He lowers his head, and the tears drip onto the plate, mixing with the crumbs of the sandwich, and you look at him and see a broken man, a man who lost everything and is clinging to the only thing left, and you know, with a certainty that squeezes your lungs like a too-tight belt, that he won't survive if you leave. Not in the physical sense — you don't think he'll kill himself — but in the deeper sense, that the person he was before will die for good, and what's left will be an empty shell, a survivor who never learned to live, only to exist.

And you don't want that, in truth, you never wanted that. You just wanted to break up with him, slowly and painfully, and move on, and forget, and one day find someone who looked at you like you mattered, and now you're trapped in this purgatory of guilt and fear and a responsibility you never asked for, never wanted, that was dumped in your lap like a child that isn't yours but will die if you don't look after it.

"Lie down," you say. "I'll finish up here and come to the bedroom."

He gets up slowly, takes the plate, carries it to the sink, and for a moment the two of you stand side by side, you with your arms crossed and him with wet hands dripping into the sink, and he whispers "thank you" before leaving, and you stand there, staring at the window.

You finish washing the plate, dry your hands and go to the bedroom, where you find him sitting on the bed with a photo of the two of you from the day you met.

"Did you sleep well?" he asks, because he doesn't know what else to say.

"More or less," you answer, watching him stroke the corner of the photo. "Only a few minutes, probably. You're basically a ghost to me, I thought you were asleep."

He doesn't ask why you didn't take sleeping pills, doesn't complain, and that's different too because the old Bobby would have complained, would have said something like "you could've taken that crap they gave me to sleep, you know? Then you wouldn't be bothering me at this hour" in that tone of someone making an accusation disguised as a joke, but this Bobby just lowers his head and murmurs "you could have woken me up, we could have talked about it" and you really want to ask why he decided to change, because fear alone wouldn't be capable of that.

"Bobby," you begin, sitting down next to him. "We need to talk."

He lifts his head slowly, and his eyes meet yours, and you see the fear that this is the conversation, the fear that you'll say the words he must already know deep down.

"That's fine," he says, and his hands are shaking a little. "Go ahead."

"Before you disappeared," you say slowly, "we weren't okay."

"I know," he whispers.

"You know?" and your voice rises a bit. "Because I tried to talk to you so many times. I tried to sit here and say that something was wrong, and you... you ignored me. Or worse, you made me feel like I was making up problems."

"I know," he repeats. "I know, and I'm so sorry. I'm sorry for everything."

"Sorry doesn't fix a damn thing," you say, and the sentence comes out harsher than you meant, but it's true, it's a truth you swallowed for so long. "Sorry doesn't erase the nights I spent crying alone in the bathroom while you played video games in the living room. Sorry doesn't erase the times you called me dramatic because I wanted to talk about us."

"I was an idiot," he says, and his hands are so trembling now. "I was an idiot and I didn't deserve you and I knew that down there, every time I thought about you and remembered the way I treated you."

You want to believe him. God, how you want to believe him.

But there's a part of you — a cynical, hurt, deeply tired part — that whispers he's only saying this because he nearly died, he's only saying this because he needs someone to hold his hand while the world falls apart, and when he feels better, he'll go back to being the same as always, and you'll be there, trapped again, waiting for crumbs.

"Remember the fight we had about kids?" you ask, and you see his face change and his eyes widen a little.

"Please," he begs, his voice so low it sounds like a prayer. "Not now."

"Why not now?" you insist, and you feel the anger rising hot in your chest. "Why do we always have to wait? Why can we never talk about the difficult things?"

And you go back to that night like it was yesterday.

It was a Saturday, and you'd been to a friend's birthday, a friend who'd just had a baby, and the house was full of people and noise and children running from one side to the other, and you caught yourself looking at the baby in its mother's arms, a small, pink, fragile being, and you felt something, not necessarily a desire to have children, but a desire to at least think about the subject with him, to know what he felt, to align your dreams or at least understand where each of you stood.

You waited for the party to end, waited to get home, waited for him to finish watching the footage he'd taken while sitting on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table, and when you finally found the courage, you sat down next to him and said:

"Bobby, what do you think about us talking about... the future?"

He didn't even take his eyes off the borrowed camera.

"What kind of future?"

"Family, you know? Kids. Whether you think about it, whether you don't... I just wanted to know."

That's when he laughed.

"Kids?" he repeated, like you'd suggested they move to Mars. "We can barely pay the flat's bills, and you want to talk about kids?"

"I'm not saying I want to have kids now," you answered, feeling your patience starting to wear thin. "I'm saying I want to know if you want to have them at some point. It's a normal conversation, Bobby. Couples talk about this."

He finally put the camera aside, but the look he gave you was cold, like you were a problem he always needed to solve.

"Look," he said, and his voice had that tired tone that said you're being annoying again, let's get this over with, "I don't know, alright? It's not something I think about much. And frankly, the way things are, I don't know if it's a good idea to bring a kid into the world right now. The world's shit, we're poor, we don't even know if we'll still be together in two months."

You swallowed hard.

"What do you mean 'we don't even know if we'll still be together'?" you asked, your eyebrows knitting together.

He sighed, ran a hand through his hair, made that face of here we go again with the drama.

"I'm just being realistic, couples break up, it's normal. You can't plan a whole life based on 'what ifs'."

You remember how your chest hurt in that moment.

"So you can't even imagine us together in five years?" you pushed, because you were a masochist and needed to hear it.

"I don't know," he repeated, and got up from the sofa, stretched his arms, yawned. "Look, maybe yes, maybe no, we'll see, you can't keep thinking about that right now."

He went to the bedroom and turned on the telly, and you sat on the sofa for a long time before going to bed, where you lay staring at his back while he snored softly, seeming perfectly fine with the fact that you were never a priority, and that was the first time you thought about leaving.

"You said you didn't even know if we'd still be together in two months," you remind him. "You said it like I was disposable."

"I didn't say that," he argues, his eyes filling with tears.

"You did," you retort, pushing your hair out of your face, like a hysteric, exactly like he used to call you. "You said 'we don't even know if we'll still be together'. And I sat there thinking, Bobby, trying to understand how someone who says they love me can say something like that."

"I was being immature," he says, and the words come out fast, desperate. "I was being a prick, I didn't think about things. I didn't... I didn't realise what I had."

"You never realised," you answer, and your voice cracks in the middle, but you keep going because you need to, because these words have been stuck in your throat for months. "You never realised anything, Bobby. I told you about my day and you barely looked up. I asked for us to do something together and you said you were tired. I tried to talk about feelings and you called me dramatic. And I kept accepting it, kept accepting it, kept accepting it, until one day I woke up and thought 'I don't know who I am without him anymore, but I also don't know who I am with him'."

The silence that follows is deafening.

"I wish I could go back in time," he says finally, his voice so small it sounds like it's coming from very far away. "I wish I could erase everything I did and start over, be better, treat you the way you deserved from the beginning."

"But you can't," you say, and it's just a fact, a truth you both already know. "You can't go back in time. Neither of us can."

"Then what do I do?" he asks, and the desperation in his voice is so raw, so naked, that you feel your own anger retreat just enough to make room for that painful thing that lives in the middle of your chest, that thing that is still love or maybe just the memory of love. "Tell me what to do, because I don't know. I don't know how to fix a whole person when I can barely fix myself."

You could say you go to therapy, you get treatment, you learn to be a decent person on your own before trying to be part of someone else's life, but the words don't come, because you know he won't do it, that he'll promise and even try for a few weeks and then go back to his old habits because it's easier, because the comfort of mediocrity is a trap he always falls into.

"I don't know," you answer, and it's the most honest thing you've said in a long time. "I don't know what you do, Bobby. I don't know what I do."

He lifts his eyes to you, and for a moment you see the boy you met back in your teens, the Bobby who made crap jokes but was always there when you needed him, that boy who held your hand in the cinema without even realising he was doing it, that boy who said "I love you" for the first time with a trembling voice and ears red with embarrassment.

He's still in there somewhere, buried under layers of neglect and immaturity and fear, but you don't know if you have the strength to dig anymore.

"You're going to break up with me, aren't you?" he asks.

You open your mouth to say yes, that yes, that's what you want, that's what you need, that's what you rehearsed for so long, and suddenly you're crying. Bobby pulls you into a hug and you should push him away, should say don't touch me, but your body doesn't obey, and you bury your face in his shoulder and cry everything you didn't cry in the months he was gone, cry the anger and the guilt and the relief and the fear and that horrible, confusing thing that isn't love.

"I'm not going to break up with you today," you say, and your voice is hoarse from crying. "I don't know if we're going to be able to fix this," you continue, the words coming out slowly. "I don't know if I want to fix it. I just know that right now, today, I can't tell you to leave."

"I don't want to leave," he says, too desperate. "I want to show you I can be better."

"Showing isn't the same as being," you answer, and finally lift your eyes to him. "You can show me for a week, for a month, but I need to know if you are, Bobby. If deep down, when the fear passes and life goes back to normal, you'll still be the person I need. Or if you'll go back to who you were."

He doesn't have an answer for that, but the truth is neither do you.

You lie down together in bed and he strokes your hair, closing his eyes, but you don't pretend you've forgotten anything, you remember everything perfectly, every argument, every insult, every scream, every bit of crap you lived through under that roof, but there's still a part of you, small and stubborn and deeply stupid, that still believes he can be the man you always needed him to be, even knowing that hope isn't a plan and that loving alone was never enough.