The thick smoke of the cigarette rose slowly between them, wrapping itself around the thin mist that remained floating over the sidewalk after the storm.
Chri watched the gray trail disperse into the icy air of the approaching dawn. Then he slowly turned his head toward the boy beside him. His eyes slid over the crumpled pack that Cri held tightly between his wet fingers.
"An entire pack?" Chri said, breaking the silence with a voice that had lost every sharp edge. "When I first met you, you smoked three or four a week at most. You hated them."
Cri took a slow drag, letting the smoke fill his lungs before exhaling it upward. A thin, bitter smile curled his lips. "Maybe some time has passed."
His throat suddenly tightened. A violent cramp rose from his chest, tearing a deep, muffled cough from him. Cri abruptly turned to the side, bringing a paper tissue completely soaked with rain to his mouth. He coughed again, his shoulders trembling, and when he opened the cloth in his hands again, a dark, thick stain of blood had appeared in the center.
Chri stared at him. His jaw tightened slightly, but he did not look away. There was no disgust left in his eyes. Only a pain in his heart that he could not hide.
"It seems to me that ever since you quit football, we're only getting worse, am I wrong?" Chri murmured quietly.
"Unfortunately," Cri replied softly, folding the tissue with trembling fingers before putting it back into his pocket. He looked at his soaked sneakers. "Everything goes downhill like this. When you stop something that keeps you standing, everything else collapses in a chain reaction."
Chri huffed, letting out a cloud of white vapor between his teeth. "I understand. It kind of pains me to see..."
He stopped halfway through the sentence. His eyes remained fixed on Cri's slender figure, while inside his head a thought months old came knocking again with disarming clarity: What is he to me? Is he just a distant memory? An old acquaintance I've remained attached to by accident?
"Friend," Chri said aloud, breaking the thought before it could hurt them both.
Cri raised his gaze, surprised by that word spoken so suddenly, without warning.
Chri tilted his head back, staring at the shades of purple and orange beginning to color the edges of the clouds. "Anyway... now I'd like to get myself a motorcycle. One of those old ones, to fix up. The problem is that I don't know how to do absolutely anything. I don't even know where you start when taking apart a carburetor."
Cri hinted at a smile, finding for a moment a tiny piece of his old light again. "You know I can work on motorcycles. Skill I picked up from my brother. He spent entire nights in the garage showing me how to adjust a chain or how to clean spark plugs."
Chri looked at him sideways, with a fake, stern expression. "I know. But I wouldn't even trust you with a rag doll, let alone a real motorcycle."
"Listen who's talking!" Cri replied, shaking his head with a quiet chuckle. "Coming from someone who can't tell a wrench from a hammer."
Chri burst out laughing, a warm laugh that made all the cold of the night disappear for a second. "Says the guy who almost set an entire house on fire with a simple one-euro lighter!"
"I was little!" Cri justified himself, covering his face with his hands while laughing too. "And besides, the curtain only caught a tiny corner!"
"A tiny corner? Cri, there was smoke all the way to the landing!" Chri reminded him, winking. "And you?"
"Me what?"
"That time at the river," Chri continued, leaning his back against the wall of a closed building. "More precisely in the Tierno tunnel... remember? You saw a giant rat in the shadows and screamed like you were a ten-year-old girl!"
"It wasn't a normal rat, it was huge!" Cri protested, his eyes shining like they hadn't in years. "And anyway, you ran away before me!"
"I didn't run away, I was getting a running start!" Chri joked. Then he gave him a light shove with his shoulder. "And that time you lost three games in a row on Bedwars and started going on that whole ridiculous rant about how much you hated women and the entire world?"
Cri shook his head, chuckling as he ran a hand through his still-damp hair. "Luckily, I don't hate them anymore. And I quit Bedwars too. It used to raise my blood pressure for no reason."
Chri burst into open, clean laughter, the kind that comes from the stomach. And Cri joined him, laughing wholeheartedly, with a strange and beautiful feeling filling his chest: the feeling of having returned home after an incredibly long and devastating journey.
They looked at each other for a second in silence, letting the laughter slowly fade into the air.
"I missed this," Cri suddenly said. His voice had lowered, becoming warm, vulnerable, devoid of any mask. "I missed talking to you without having to pretend I was okay, or without having to play the part of the broken one. I simply missed... talking to you."
Chri stared at him. His smile softened, turning into something deep and sincere. "I missed it too, Cri. Like hell. More than I've ever had the courage to admit to myself."
(Flashback)
Last New Year's Eve before they "left each other"
The city lights shone in the distance in the darkness of midnight. The cold cut into their faces, but neither of them seemed to care.
Cri held a large red firecracker in his hand, with its short fuse ready to be lit. His boyish eyes were calm, almost sleepy, but his hands were steady.
"THROW IT! THROW IT!" Chri shouted behind him, hopping from one foot to the other like a madman, his cheeks red from the cold and excitement. "Hurry before someone sees us!"
Cri glanced at him, keeping his usual monotonous and unruffled voice: "Okay, calm down. Don't shout."
With a fluid movement of his arm, he lit the fuse and threw the firecracker high into the dark sky. The explosion echoed loudly through the night air, releasing a cascade of green, red, and golden sparks that looked like a small fireworks show made just for them.
The two boys tilted their heads back, watching the lights slowly fade into the mist, while they burst into hysterical laughter.
"So the aliens will see us!" they shouted together at the top of their lungs, letting their voices echo through the silence of the neighborhood.
(Present)
The memory slowly faded, delicate like the mist dissolving beneath the first rays of sunlight.
Along the sidewalk, a little farther ahead, two children in heavy jackets were running through the puddles. One of them launched a small luminous fountain onto the wet asphalt, and orange sparks flew through the thick air.
Chri and Cri stopped abruptly.
They turned to look at the two children, then looked into each other's eyes. Without saying a single word, in exactly the same way as that last New Year's Eve, they let out a spontaneous, synchronized laugh, tied to an invisible thread that time had failed to break.
"See you around, Christopher?" Chri asked, taking a step backward toward his street.
"See you around, Chri," Cri replied, slowly nodding.
They exchanged a nod, intimate and full of things that no longer needed to be explained aloud.
Cri turned and walked home. His footsteps on the wet asphalt were no longer heavy. He no longer felt like a ghost dragged down by the gravity of his own pain.
When he arrived in front of the entrance, he put the key into the lock. He paused for a moment on the threshold, turning to look at the wet street, the light of dawn illuminating the rooftops of Florence and the smoke from the last cigarette dispersing into the open sky.
He breathed in the fresh morning air, feeling his chest finally become light. He smiled softly to himself.
"It's so bitter. But sweet."
END OF PART 1 - Don't look back cri