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It’s not over till it’s over.
Robert spends an unreasonably long time adjusting the chair, picking the right background, imagining the shadows travel across his face with the sun — for inexplicable reasons, he’s sure he’ll need multiple takes, so the lighting has to remain acceptable; he sits down, opens his phone camera, catches a glimpse of his own face and closes it back again. Locks the phone. Covers the unblinking camera eye with the pad of his thumb just to be sure. Maybe the angle is not right, he thinks, maybe the lighting is off, after all; he could do it in the kitchen, next to the window, and hope that a change of location will help his face lose a decade of choices and decisions that would otherwise stare back from the reflection.
Or maybe something’s not right with him. Maybe he can’t do it at all. Maybe he should smash up his phone right here and now, get on a plane, fly over to Dortmund and show up unannounced, and stand there with all his choices and decisions and regrets etched on his face in an unflattering light of Marco’s scrutiny. For a minute, Robert even entertains the idea. That, after all, would be the most honest thing to do, and Marco has always been a lover of honesty — except for the times Robert was honest with himself, because Lewy’s honesty led him away whenever Marco’s advised to stay.
Besides, there’s only so much time they have left on this continent, not separated by an ocean, to compare their truths face-to-face and find out, once and forever, who regretted less — the one who ran or the one who chained himself up: Lewy would love to know at least for the sake of closure for all those years he spent secretly hoping Marco would follow suit — not because he expected him at Bayern anytime soon, but because, at the very least, it’d make them participants of the same race, both chasing after something, even if not one another.
But Reus refused to run. All Robert had left to do was watch his face slowly disappear from the imaginary rearview mirror.
And it faded, faded, faded, until Dortmund and Marco were nothing but a vague mirage, something that may have happened to him or someone else who told him the story over a beer. And Robert kept running — that was his honesty; and eventually, standing on two different sides of the same field with Marco, he realized that all the running had taken him so far from where they used to be that even if he were to scream, Reus wouldn’t hear him now.
This new striking awareness of what has become of them, once almost breathing in sync, enveloped every day and night to follow in the flavor of despair usually reserved for failing marriages. Every time Robert looked, Marco seemed just a little younger, a little closer in time to his twenties, a little further away from his ever-elusive Lewy.
And yet, at the risk of remaining unheard, he could’ve tried to ask.
Every day, those thousands of days — he could’ve tried to ask.
Some answers, Lewandowski discovered over time, he wasn’t ready for. Marco has always been a lover of honesty — more, it appeared, than he was Robert’s.
Methodically, he traces circles on the dark phone screen with the tip of his thumb, as if trying to erase the hesitation written all over his mirrored doppelgänger. It’s not over till it’s over, but what’s the use of festering wounds you scrape open every time they attempt to heal, what’s the use of faded film of memory on infinite display in every corner of the mind, edges cutting deep with every absentminded swipe — Robert jumps up at the contact: shades of green and bleached, and yellow-and-black where black stands for Marco’s ecstatic blown pupils, and blue-and-red where red is the color of flushed cheeks and kissed lips, and those are the only things he remembers, the only colors he is capable of recalling — the only colors he seems to know. He won’t board the plane to Dortmund because the ghost-of-Reus-past will get the window seat, and, be it a grey void or a familiar kaleidoscope behind Marco’s door, it’ll cripple him either way; too much time spent nursing inflamed regrets, widening the gap with every answer not given, to undo it all and come back to their non-existent home now.
He moves his thumb away, unlocks the phone. Sun is turning slowly, graciously gifting him more time; to be honest, Robert doesn’t care about the way light falls anymore. He doesn’t think he ever did.
He sits down in the chair and records the video. It’s surreal, but he sits through it, forcing his own lips to smile and part around sentences and stay sealed whenever things that shouldn’t come out dance at the tip of the tongue (have you ever regretted staying because i sure regretted so many things but not you never you and it’s a shame you wouldn’t even hear any of this anymore from where i am from where you are) — it’s the least he can do. He records the video, and then puts the phone away and closes his eyes, the insides of eyelids forever covered in colors — green and bleached, yellow-and black, blue-and-red.
“Thank you with all my heart for all the amazing moments we had together. Thank you for your support, and again, thank you for every moment I got to enjoy with you.
All the best, legend!”
And, on the most ordinary of afternoons, he finally knows it’s over.