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NEDJELJA
He heard Lovro’s voice, sometime during his sleep.
Or at least he thought he did. He couldn’t parse through the haze of his slumber, but Lovro’s voice had somehow winded through his mind, floating into his dreams. He didn’t know what he was saying, but all he could see was Lovro in front of him, blue eyes piercing while his lips moved, muddled words falling from his mouth like water.
Ivan’s trying to listen, but it’s as though there is something barring him from Lovro, a distortion around him that stops sound from travelling. Ivan couldn’t reach forward either; his hand fell short of just making contact with him, never once grazing his skin no matter how close he got.
He woke up in cold sweat some time during the afternoon, dragged from his sleep so messily he could still feel the tendrils of his dreams clinging to him stubbornly, a deadweight muffling his mind.
He reached out blindly. “Lovro,” he whispered. He was just there, wasn’t he, and wasn’t that his voice just faintly outside the door, his footsteps padding across the creaking floorboards?
“Lovro,” he rasped again.
He heard the steps coming closer, stopping by the side of his bed. He pried his eyes open with effort, heart pounding.
Sonja stood over him instead, face drawn tightly, gaze unreadable.
“You're awake.”
Ivan’s mind was still doused in haziness. He could only bring himself to say, “Where is he?”
Sonja's face barely changed. “He left. Hours ago.”
So he was here.
Ivan squeezed his eyes shut against the sudden violent clench that tore through his heart. He missed him by minutes, by hours. He didn't know what was worse. Did he come into his room? Did he sit next to his bed? Or maybe he didn't even cross the threshold of his door. Maybe he didn't even sit down, just stood on the landing, poised to flight as he always was, and when he left he left without even glancing into his room.
A hand nudged him. “Sit up.”
Ivan opened his eyes again. Sonja was holding a mug in front of him. He sat up slowly and took it, downing the entire cup, his thirst hitting him suddenly. He handed it back to Sonja and she retreated to the kitchen, leaving Ivan staring at his ceiling.
He closed his eyes and tried to recall his dream from the fragments that were still drifting around his head, but they eluded him as soon as he tried to focus. The one image that burned in his mind, though, was Lovro’s face as he spoke. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out whether he looked sad or angry. All he could be sure of were his eyes; impossibly blue, impossibly clear.
He thought about the blueness of his eyes. He deliberated on the colour often; recently he was considering a dark aquamarine, never quite settling into a singular shade, always shifting lighter or deeper. A while ago it had been the clear cerulean of a pool in winter, translucent almost. He tried mixing that out of his watercolours once, breaking out his palette that he hadn’t used in almost three years, then got frustrated that no blue was clear enough, no green rich enough.
Now he just settled for seeing it behind his closed eyes, never able to be truly captured. Or wait for it to waft into his dreams, clinging to tendrils. Burning through his mind.
“Here.”
Ivan opened his eyes, and this time Sonja was holding out the mug alongside a blister pack of lorazepam. Ivan eyed it for a second before taking it. He punctured the foil and shook out the little pill, feeling Sonja’s eyes boring into him as he placed it in his mouth and swallowed it dry. Sonja handed him the mug and waited for him to finish drinking with her arms crossed.
When he was done she still didn’t speak. He didn’t want to meet her eyes just yet, so he took his time setting down the mug on his bedside table. His eyes caught on the corner of a notebook page, peeking over on a pile of his sketchbooks. A drawing of Lovro, half-finished in charcoal.
He didn’t need to see the whole picture to know that it was one of the earlier ones that he had done, back at first when he was obsessed with getting the exact curvature of his cheek right. Then later, cataloguing the pattern and distance between each of his moles; after that, it had been all about carving out the arch of his nose.
He turned away. Sonja was still staring at him, unspeaking. He leaned his head back and waited for the berating to start. But Sonja just sighed and sat down on his bed.
“How are you feeling?”
Ivan shrugged.
“You remember what happened?”
Ivan shrugged again.
Sonja sighed again and rubbed the space between her eyebrows. “Ivan, come on. We have to talk about this.”
And Ivan hated it, because he already knew what she was going to say. You fucked up, you let it all go, months of it– the same shit that she had been warning him about, that she had spent all this time trying to get through into his head. Next she was going to say, you promised, you lied to me, and what was Ivan going to say to that?
I was lying everyday because I thought that he was worth it, that he would take all the doubts and the unknown and leave me with the truth of what I was.
“What,” he said instead, voice barely a rasp.
Sonja stared at him, and even though he’s spent half his life knowing all her expressions, he couldn’t bring himself to decipher whether her gaze was pitying or angry.
“You said you would tell me if you wanted to be off your meds.”
Ivan barely held back a bitter laugh.
“I always want to be off my meds.”
“That’s not the point. It’s about telling me.”
“What could you have done? It’s not like–”
“Talked to your doctor?” Sonja interrupted. “Went with you to your appointments? Like I have done for the past months?”
Ivan shook his head. “I never needed you to do that.”
“But I did!” Sonja exclaimed, eyes wide. “I did all that because I trusted you! Because I thought you trusted me!”
Ivan couldn’t say anything to that.
Sonja looked away when it was clear he wasn’t going to answer. When she spoke she didn’t sound bitter, just flat. “But you stopped telling me things long before that, right?”
“It wasn't because of him."
"I wasn't going to say that it was." She sighed and looked down. "Or maybe it is. It doesn't matter. You know that's not why we went wrong."
Ivan couldn't quite keep the scathingness out of his voice. "Are you dissecting our relationship or my brain?"
Sonja stared at him, and it irked Ivan to see that she looked more pitying than angry.
"If you felt unwell, if you knew you weren't happy with– with–" Sonja gestured around vaguely, futilely. "–all this, we could've talked about it, you didn't have to go to the extremes–"
"Talk?" Ivan sat up slightly, flaring up. "Talk? With you, so you can make sure I never forget how fucked up I am? With the doctor and those fucking counsellors, with my parents and your aunt and everybody you told about how insane I am?"
"I never said–"
"All these fucking months all you ever want me to do is to talk and talk, like it would somehow make me better." He laughed bitterly. "Well, the meds didn't cure me. I'm still fucked up, but I guess it was fine that I was walking around like a ghost as long as I wasn't jumping off buildings, right?"
"That's the point, Ivan!" Sonja snapped. "If you were feeling like that you could've told me. Your parents. We could've gone to the doctor's–"
"For what?" Ivan interrupted. "To change my dosage. To try another medication. To take me off this pill, to add another one. Like it'll change anything. Pretending that we're not going around in fucking circles."
"Did you have to hide your meds, though? Lie to me about taking them?" Sonja questioned. "Just as I thought I could begin to trust that you would take them, that I didn't have to remind you and watch you everyday."
"You never should've been doing that," Ivan said, flatly. "I'm not a fucking child."
It was Sonja's turn to laugh. "Oh, you tell me. I wish I didn't have to rummage through your bag and your trash just to check if you've hidden your meds. I'm sick of having to snoop around just to make sure you're not getting worse."
"Don't do that then." Ivan went back to staring at the ceiling. "Should've just left me be, save yourself the trouble."
"So that is what you were trying to do?" Sonja asked. "Your fucked-up way to push me away, right?"
Ivan didn't answer.
Sonja continued on. "Couldn't say it to my face that you wanted out of this, so you decided to destroy yourself? Make me leave like that?"
"It was suffocating me," Ivan retorted. "You were suffocating me." He shook his head. "Don't act like you wouldn't have tried a thousand ways to work it out, whatever that means."
Anger flickered across Sonja's face, and Ivan felt a sick twist of satisfaction at goading her. But she just took a deep breath and looked away. When she spoke her voice was low.
"You didn't have to get him involved."
Ivan didn't react, but he couldn't help the sudden jolt of sickness that pushes up in his chest.
"It wasn't fair to him, using him as a prop in your plan to escape me."
Ivan stared into Sonja's eyes. "Is that what you think I was doing?"
Sonja stared back. "You tell me."
She looked down at her clasped hands. "I kept trying to think of the reasons and blaming myself before I realised it wasn't my fault. You were just so sick and tired of me, weren't you? You wanted to break free and I was in your way. Because I knew too much. And he didn't, so you could be– I don't know. The Tomos-riding guy. Smoking joints, having fun. You wanted him to believe that." When she stared into him it felt like she had already dissected him to the bone. "You needed him to believe that yourself."
What could he say? What could he retort with that didn't sound like a feeble attempt to retain his dignity?
Maybe she was right, it was because she knew everything already, and Lovro was still figuring out who he was. Maybe it was the exhilaration of not being known yet, of trading glances like they were secrets. Lovro didn’t know how fucked up he was, didn’t know that beyond the posturing and banter he was just alone and always afraid. He looked at him all anew, and Ivan liked that.
But, fuck, he had looked at him like nobody had.
Ivan wanted it to be a lie, to be nothing but one of his delusions, but he could not shake it, the fact that Lovro looked at him like no one had, not just in curiosity and awe, but like he was something to be known.
Like he wanted to know him.
None of that mattered, though. Because he fucked it up, like he always did. Like he was doomed to.
Sonja was still staring at him, but now her gaze was sad, the sheer pity in her eyes curdling Ivan's stomach.
"I don't know what's worse. You thinking that you love him or you making him think you love him."
Ivan had nothing to say to that. The shame and bitterness roiling in his gut had pushed a lump into his throat, jolting painfully when he swallowed.
He closed his eyes and turned away from Sonja.
PONEDJELJAK
Ivan remembered why it was so easy to fake that he was well.
Having to keep up with his meds, to show up to his appointments and actually answer questions beyond the superficial nod and 'I'm well', to have to explain how he's feeling when half the time he had no idea either. It was so draining, so fucking repetitive.
And all the while, he was being watched like a hawk by someone, always someone. Staring at him, trying to gauge his emotions. Being asked by their gazes, Are you lying? Are you hiding something right now?
At least Sonja decided not to come with him to his appointments. She had left late yesterday, after talking with his parents. He had heard them whispering in the living room while he pretend to be sleeping. He didn't need to eavesdrop to know what they were talking about. He had a sense of deja vu in that moment, feeling like he first did those many months ago, when he had his first severe manic episode.
All progress, lost. Back to whispering outside his room. Tip-toeing around him, searching for signs that he'd suddenly lose it. But even worse this time, because their eyes were resentful as well, silently accusing him for undoing it all.
He thought about that and more, at the doctor's office, staring out the window sullenly while the doctor started talking about routines and honesty, his mom nodding along and unsubtly elbowing him to listen.
He tried his best, he really did. He told them how long he stopped taking his meds (nearly a month ago), how much sleep he had the past week (barring yesterday, zero), his diet (coffee and stale bread). He drew back once the doctor started asking about how he felt, however. He just shrugged and stared at the one stain on the corner of the desk leg. His mom pushed him, and a flare of irritation made him snap, "Shitty. Really fucking bad."
That warranted another round of beratement on the car ride back. Well, he did get his dosage increased, however, along with a healthy side of new mood stabilisers. Wasn't that great?
He spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, no urge to do anything else but stare at his ceiling and let his swirling thoughts of loathing and regret overwhelm him. After his mania, there's always something of a sick comfort falling back to his self-hatred, the repeated litany of resentment familiar, well-known.
His mom tried to get him to talk; Ivan could tell how anxious she got with every passing minute he stayed unmoving in his bed. She sat down and tried to be gentle at first, making it seem as though she wasn't probing. When it was clear Ivan wasn't going to give her more than one-syllable responses, her irritation flared and she started one of her rants about his attitude, his unforthcomingness, framing it all as a personal deceit against her.
Eventually his dad came in to play peacemaker, though what peace he was brokering Ivan wasn't sure, considering that he was facing a one-sided lashing. But his dad made sure to show him that he wasn't letting him off either, by the frown that he wore while ushering his mom out of the room.
It didn't matter. He had nothing to say. And besides, he was doing it, wasn't he. He's dutifully swallowing his meds under the sharp gaze of everyone around him. He went to the day's appointment, and he will go to all the ones scheduled for this week and every week after that. What more did they want?
His mom even went into his room to take away all the weed he's stored, obviously after being informed by Sonja. He didn't object, or even bother to pretend to sleep, just watched it unmoving from his bed, then listened as his mom made her way to the kitchen to confiscate the few bottles of alcohol he had. He was pretty sure she also took away the knives and scissors, if Sonja hadn't already.
This was what they wanted. No, this was what he needed, right. He had to keep telling himself that. Maybe he would believe it someday.
UTORAK
Sonja came by with food in the afternoon.
Ivan didn't say it, but he was grateful, at the very least, mainly because there was an understanding between them that they've said most of what they've needed to say. Not that there was closure, but that at least she understood him more than his parents did, and therefore wouldn't be cautiously examining him at every turn. She certainly had no illusions that he would be spilling his heart out.
They ate in the living room, him sitting on the floor while she sat on the sofa. He sat facing away from his canvases and paintings that were in the corner, but their presence burnt at the back of his head all the same.
He couldn't look at them anymore. Usually he liked studying what he drew after an episode; as provoking as it was, there was always this uninhibited rawness of his paintings that he couldn't help but admire. That fucked-up part of his brain would circle around capturing that elusive quality then get angry about the drugs that were muffling that source in his brain.
But this time his paintings only unsettled him. Besides reminding him of what he's done, they felt off-kilter, in a way that went beyond being just intriguing.
He would ask Sonja to throw them away, and he's pretty sure she would offer anyway, but a small part wanted to think that maybe in the far-off future he might take a look at them and not feel overwhelming nausea rise in his throat.
Was that hope? In his head, Ivan laughed a little ironically at that. Maybe it was. It's been so long, he didn't think he knew what it felt like anymore.
Their lunch was quiet, neither of them bothering to fill the silence with anything. They knew each other too well to see which words were hollow, all small talk futile.
Sonja did tell him that his parents had informed the school about his absence, and because of that they were going to assign a counsellor to him for the rest of the school year. Great. Starting over in a new school, gone. Add that to the long list of things he's irrevocably fucked over.
He checked his phone for the first time in days to reply to the email that the school sent him, to get his consent or whatever. He didn't have a lot of notifications waiting for him, mostly just from Sonja on that night.
A jolt went through him when he saw the blank space where the Instagram app used to be. He could barely recall, but he deactivated sometime after the blur that was the night of his episode. He remembered getting a notification from Instagram, probably somebody from school who found his profile and found it hilarious; there were a few of those lurking on his page during the week. At that moment he had only felt so much shame that he went straight into his settings and deactivated his account. All of it gone, as if it could somehow erase the catastrophic mess he'd created.
Lovro hadn't texted him, obviously. Ivan didn't know if he'd rather him have or not, considering if he did it probably would've been just cursing him out for what had happened. Maybe Ivan would settle for that, come to think of it. Anger would mean he still cared, that Ivan hadn't burnt every bridge.
But even so, that didn't mean redemption was in the cards for him. More likely, Lovro would block him in the days to come. Delete all their chats, if he hadn't already.
And if– when he goes back to school, they will pass in the hallways and Lovro will turn away without a second look, his face shuttering. Not anger, not even resentment. Just dismissal. Like they've never met.
After Sonja left Ivan retired back to his room. The paintings reminded him of his sketches, and he somehow started rifling through the sketchbooks and loose pages stacking up on his desk. It didn't take long until he found a sketch of Lovro. His chest clenched when he saw the detailing of that all-too-familiar cheek, the smattering of his moles.
There was nothing but lightness in those pencil lines. Back then when he sketched he would inevitably start daydreaming, reliving the exhilaration of having caught Lovro's gaze, drunk on the memories of seeing his face. He would imagine goading him into a grin, thinking about more ways that he could tease him into being flustered.
But now he had no allowance to even that anymore.
Lovro's smile, his shyness, the way he ducked his head when the tips of his ears burned. The quiet quirk of challenge that lifted his lips, crinkled the corners of his eyes. How his lips tasted. The softness of his fingertips grazing Ivan's neck. That was all he had– the memories, his sketches. Pale recollections of what it was, barely a fraction of all the whirlwind of emotions he had felt.
He put away the sketches, all hollowed out and drained. He couldn't even pity himself, wallow in lovesickness, not when this was all because of his actions. Only himself to blame.
When he climbed into bed to sleep he felt something graze his foot. He looked underneath his covers and found a black hoodie, practically crammed into the gap between his bed and the wall. He fished it out, already feeling that familiar sore ache tearing through his chest.
It was Lovro's, of course. He must have left it last week, during those two days where they holed themselves up in his flat in what seemed like unending bliss.
There was no denying that he was pathetic, but with that recognition also meant that he had little self-respect left. He barely even registered bringing the hoodie up to his nose and inhaling. It smelled faintly of Lovro, of smoke and underneath that, the slight note of his citrusy shampoo.
He closed his eyes. He could almost feel the warmth of Lovro's body in his hands.
SRIJEDA
The days were beginning to blur together, but Ivan was feeling oddly grateful for that. The more disorienting the passing of time was, the more he could pretend that he didn't have to escape the vacuum of his room and face the consequences of what he had done.
Of course, that wasn't entirely true. He did have to go to his appointments. Today was the counsellor that his parents had made him go to after his first manic episode. He had stopped seeing her a few months afterwards, after Ivan insisted to his parents that the medication was helping and talking for hours every week wasn't.
The last time he saw the counsellor he had been lying to her face, wearing a placid smile on his face and nodding while she talked about coping strategies and negative self-talk. Then he had walked out of her office and threw away all the booklets that she had given him to chart his mood and symptoms.
Today, sitting in her office again, he had felt like a prisoner, dragged back to his cell after another attempt to escape. For her credit, she barely betrayed any sign that she knew that he was faking compliance, or that she was irked by it. For that, Ivan tried to listen to her. He didn't really speak much, but he said a little about his manic episode, or what he could recall of it. He could feel that she wanted to jump straight into dissecting what triggered him, how he handled it, but she held back instead.
"We'll take this slow," she had said before he left. "Slower than last time, so we can adjust and see how you want to set the pace. Next time we can re-open the conversation about your triggers."
He wanted to laugh at that. Identify his triggers. Was it the pot that he'd been smoking, or the insomnia? Or the ever-lurking fear of losing him forever? Take your fucking pick.
When he got back home he didn't want to do anything else but put on his CDs and lay on the floor. Inevitably, thoughts of Lovro floated up to the surface. It didn't sting as much anymore, not because he's reached any sort of emotional reckoning, but because he's resigned himself to the truth that there's nothing he could do to be forgiven by him.
So he let himself dwell on increasingly pathetic thoughts about Lovro, replaying over and over again every single one of his misstep from the past few days in a form of self-punishment. How callous he had been, how blind he was to the tension that was coiling in Lovro's every movement. The image of his face, contorted in disgust and anger, burnt in his mind, inescapable.
He drifted off somehow, uneasy sleep that had him startling awake hours later to find a blanket draped over him and darkness outside the windows. When he stumbled back to his room his eyes caught on one of his sketchbooks. There was this image that had clung onto him from the depths of his dreams, imposed over his vision; not Lovro's look of revulsion, but something softer, more like how he had looked at him at first, curious and fleeting and sweet.
Before Ivan knew it, he was sitting on his bed, bent over his notebook, pencil almost moving across the page of its own accord. He thought it would be difficult to draw again, but it seemed to pour out of him, like he was barely holding it back the whole time. It was incoherent at first, not the dramatic abstractness of his manic drawings but more like him trying to piece together fragments without the full image.
He couldn't stop, though. It had to be expelled from his mind, put in front of him in black lines. He started writing as well, scribbling on the margins without putting much thought behind it.
When he was done he was exhausted, barely looking at what he'd put down on paper. He collapsed in bed, not bothering to clear off the mess, and fell asleep floating among the debris of his thoughts.
ČETVRTAK
Ivan probably would've been fine with staying in his flat forever if he was alone. He was very much not alone, however, a fact that's he's repeatedly reminded of by his parents' hovering.
They wanted him to get back to school sooner, to resume normalcy and not get into even further complications with the school administration. But they took one look at Ivan, curled up unmoving on his bed, fingers stubbornly clutched to Lovro's hoodie, and knew the only way they could get him to move was by dragging him bodily away.
One positive was that his doctor supported his extended leave, saving Ivan from doing much persuading. That didn't mean his parents got any less restless with every passing day, and though they've mostly let off on their attempts to get him to speak, Ivan knew that they were far from giving up.
He never told them about Lovro. Even if Lovro wasn't caught up in what went down, he never would've talked to them about him. Sonja was different. They knew her since they were kids, and when they got together it was less of a revelation and more of a knowing grin and a comment about it being long overdue. And before Sonja– well. He didn't have a choice in that, anyway.
If he did tell them about Lovro, they probably would just think it was another one of his fixations. Besides, he was pretty sure that Sonja had told them already, so they would've adopted her narrative without question. They always trusted her more than they did him, despite what they might say.
Their distrust was made even more evident today, when his mom found a box cutter on his desk. Ivan didn't even remember that he had it; he must've left it laying around after using it to cut his canvases or something. He tried explaining that he hadn't even known it was there, that he's never used it outside of doing art, but his parents were adamant that he had been hiding it from them all this time.
They interrogated him for hours. Why did you have it? What were you doing with it? Did you attempt again? At the last one, Ivan finally snapped, "Yes, because if I was trying to off myself I'd leave the cutter lying around."
They weren't happy with that, to say the least.
He had to get out of the flat, the house, by the end of it. He sat on one of the benches overlooking the yard, the air heavy and humid from the rain. He wished he could smoke. Or better yet, drive his Tomos again. Get far away from here. But they had taken his keys too. He had nothing left but his own thoughts, a tumultuous cacophony drowning out all else.
He didn't know how long he sat out there, but eventually Sonja came and joined him. They didn't say anything for a while, just listened to the faint drip of rain on the roof.
She turned to him. "Tell me you didn't…"
"No," he said, voice hollow. "You know I won't do that."
He's tired, yes, and obviously, inevitably, in the throes of his depression, the thought has entered his mind, but it's been a long time since it was an active presence. Most days, it lingered around the periphery of everything else, shading the outline of his self-loathing.
He's gotten used to it, but its omnipresence strangely also meant that Ivan didn't really think of it much. He wasn't lying when he said he wouldn't do it.
Besides, he wasn't afraid of what he might do. It's what he's already done that he could never change.
PETAK
Ivan was crawling out of his skin to leave the flat.
The initial escape his leave offered was starting to wear off with every minute, something that certainly wasn't helped by the suffocating presence of his parents.
Well, he technically had left the house, but shuffling to and from clinics didn't exactly count. The most he's seen of the outside world was during the long car rides into town, his forehead pressed against the window as the roads rolled endlessly outside. In those moments there was nothing more he wanted than to be on his Tomos again, free to drive himself anywhere, everywhere.
But at the end of the day he was in his room again. With nowhere to escape to from his own thoughts.
He had nothing else to do but to draw. The last of his sketches were barely coherent, mostly rough outlines and shadowy shapes. He continued to write alongside what he drew as well, though he threw away most of those without taking another glance, knowing that the words were nothing but the all-too-familiar roar of self-loathing.
Sonja came by in the early evening. There was something different that Ivan sensed when she stepped in. He couldn't place it until he realised she was still wearing her coat instead of hanging it up in the hallway, like she usually does. Then he noted the slightly stilted way she stood by the doorway of his bedroom.
"I came by to get my stuff."
Ivan was slightly confused for a second. Then he remembered, yes, amidst all the mess that had happened, they had broken up. It seemed so trivial in the grand scheme of things, but also impossible to fully confront.
Ivan laid back down on his floor, an activity that had been ongoing for the past few hours, while Sonja started to look through his cabinets and drawers for her stuff. Ivan didn't really remember what she had left in his place, and he didn't really care that much if she decided to steal his things while rummaging. He deserved it, anyway.
After a minute she turned to his desk. Ivan didn't think much of it till he realised she was studying the sketches that were strewn across it. She looked over at the bed, the scattered pages on top of it. Ivan caught the moment she noticed the black hoodie lying by the pillow, her eyes pausing on it for a long while.
Ivan closed his eyes instead of waiting to see her turn her gaze to him, no doubt with a mixture of pity and bitterness.
"I think I was wrong."
Ivan opened his eyes, surprised. Sonja was holding up one of his sketches, one of his more fully-formed ones of Lovro's side-profile rendered in soft graphite, staring at it with furrowed brows.
She slowly put it back down on his desk, her back turned to him.
"I thought you were using him to keep up lies to yourself. Or that he was just your excuse to be free of me."
She finally turned to face him, and her expression was only sad. When she spoke there was no undertone of bitterness, just resignation.
"You love him, don't you."
Isn't that obvious? He wanted to say. Do you see it now? When it had been bursting out of me all this time.
Ivan didn't answer.