Page 173 of Ghost Ribbon

So no, I wouldn’t give back a single second. Because every second I spent with you was a second I was alive.

There is something else I need you to know. I remember you. Not perfectly, and not the way you remember everything. My memories have always been cruel little things, slipping through my fingers whenever I try to hold them too tightly. But I remember a boy in a garden.

You were beautiful.

I remember looking at you and seeing something that didn’t belong there, something hollow behind your eyes. A wall. You were breathing, standing, speaking, but something inside you looked like it had already given up. And I remember thinking, I want to change that.

I wanted to see you smile. I became obsessed with the thought of it. I wondered what your face would look like if that deadness disappeared. I wondered what would happen if that wall cracked. I wondered what kind of beautiful thing might be hiding underneath all that darkness.

And years later, you showed me.

And, Alexei - you are so beautiful when you smile.

I have never had words for it. I’ve tried to put it into these pages, into my drawings, into the poems I wrote at three in the morning because sleep wouldn’t come and all I could think about was the way your face changed when happiness found you. None of it is enough.

Because your smile does something to my heart. It beats faster, almost painfully. My heart has always been slow, always reminding me that there was something wrong with me. But when you smile, it works overtime, as though even my failing heart wants to stay long enough to see it again.

I love seeing you happy. That’s the simplest truth I have. Your happiness makes me happy.

And I know what you’re probably thinking while you read this. You’re probably thinking that I was the reason for it, that I was the reason you smiled. I know. And I need you to understand something: it was the greatest privilege of my life.

Being your happiness. Being the reason that deadness in your eyes finally softened. Being the person who got to watch you become alive again.

There were so many things I wanted from this life, so many things I never got to have. But being your happiness? That was my greatest accomplishment.

And you were mine.

You have been my happiness too.

I have never felt freer than I did beside you. You made me forget. For a little while, I forgot I was dying. I wasn’t a sick person when I was with you. I was just a person - a person who was loved.

No one had ever loved me the way you did.

You are my miracle, baby. You gave me pieces of yourself I didn’t know I was allowed to have. You gave me a life inside the life I was losing. You made me feel alive, and I will never be able to thank you enough for that.

So let me be selfish one last time. Just once. The final thing I will ever ask you for, the final thing I will ever take.

Please, Alexei -

live.

I know it hurts. I know, amore. I know the pain inside your chest right now probably feels bigger than the rest of the world. I know there will be moments when breathing feels impossible because I am no longer there to breathe beside you.

You are allowed to hurt. You are allowed to fall apart.

But please, don’t disappear with me.

Don’t shut everyone out.

Dimitri loves you. I know you don’t always see it. He has the emotional subtlety of a brick sometimes, but he loves you. Let him. And Ilya loves you too. He’s loud and ridiculous and has the attention span of a squirrel (don’t tell him I said that) but he loves you.

Let them in.

Please.

Don’t let the void have you again.

What you felt was real. What you gave me was real. And everything you gave me proved something I wish you had known long before I came along: you are capable of love. You always were. You were never broken beyond repair. You just needed someone to show you.