Chapter 1 – The River and the Boy

I died before I drowned. Perhaps that’s why the river feels so warm.

When you imagine death, you think of pain. Violence. Darkness. But no—this feels like slipping back into the womb of something merciful. My body drifts in silence, limbs loose, as if the current is a mother rocking her unwanted child to sleep.

Her hand is still in mine. Even now, even in this muted world where breath no longer matters, I can feel her fingers curled around mine like a vow fulfilled. She wanted this more than I did. That is the cruel truth no one will write in the newspapers. They will call it “double suicide,” as if two souls met in perfect symmetry at the gates of death. But there is nothing equal about this end.

The current kisses her hair, unspooling it like dark ink into the water. I want to turn my head and look at her face, but I no longer command this body. We are fragments now—bone, flesh, memory—drifting toward a horizon that does not exist.

It’s quiet here. Almost holy. For the first time, the voices are gone. The voices that told me to smile wider, laugh louder, live harder. Gone.

And yet, I cannot leave in peace. My thoughts linger like ghosts on a stage that has already burned down. The curtain has fallen, but I remain—an actor still rehearsing lines in the ashes.

If you have come this far, perhaps you are curious. Perhaps you want to know why a man who had everything—books, women, wine, and laughter—chose the river. Perhaps you want to believe there is an answer to such a question.

There isn’t.

But if answers are illusions, then let me at least give you the illusion of truth. I will tell you how I arrived here, on this indifferent water, with death for company and the weight of her fragile hand in mine. I will tell you how a boy who once chased fireflies in his family’s garden became a man who chased oblivion.

I remember him clearly—the boy. He laughed too much. Laughed until his ribs hurt, until tears welled at the corners of his eyes. People thought he was happy. They always do when you laugh enough. No one asks why laughter sounds like breaking glass.

He learned early that the world had no place for his silence. Silence was a crime in my father’s house, you see. Silence meant weakness, and weakness was worse than death. My father wanted a son carved from iron and law. Instead, he got me—an echo of something he could not name, something that made him avert his eyes at family dinners.

“You must become a man of consequence,” he told me once.

I was twelve. My hands were ink-stained from the stories I wrote in secret notebooks. Stories about people who disappeared without goodbyes.

“A man of consequence,” I repeated, smiling as if the phrase were a jewel I longed to wear. But inside, the words tasted like sawdust.

What is a man of consequence? Is it someone who bends others to his will? Someone who crushes his own heart for duty? If so, then forgive me, Father, for I was born without that kind of spine. I was born soft—like water, like words—doomed to slip through the cracks of your empire.

Ah, but I am digressing. Death makes you nostalgic. Or maybe that’s just my vanity speaking, even now, when vanity should have drowned with me.

Where was I? The boy. Yes, the boy who laughed because it was easier than screaming. He discovered something beautiful once—ink. The way it stains your fingers, the way it leaves a mark that soap cannot erase. At fourteen, he wrote his first line:

“Living feels like being buried alive.”

He thought it was profound. He thought it would save him. It did not.

Words are useless when your bones ache for oblivion. Words do not stop your father’s hand when it cracks against your cheek because you dared to write instead of recite his political speeches. Words cannot kiss you back when the girl you love drowns in the same despair that devours you.

You think this is about romance, don’t you? You think this is some tragic love story fit for the stage. You’re wrong. She was not my salvation. She was my accomplice. We were two criminals conspiring against life itself. She believed death was a wedding veil. I told her I agreed. I lied.

If there is a god, I hope He is laughing. It would be poetic, wouldn’t it? The man who mocked divinity all his life becoming a joke for eternity. I can hear the punchline already: “They jumped into a river, and all they found was mud.”

Do you know what I thought about in those final seconds, when the air was clawing out of my lungs and the water was filling every hollow inside me? I thought about the color of the sky. Ridiculous, isn’t it? The sky was gray, swollen with rain, and I wanted to memorize it, as if heaven were some painting I could carry with me into the dark. But it slipped away like everything else.

And then—nothing. A clean, merciful nothing.

…Until this. This floating silence. This warm embrace of water and weeds. I should be grateful. I should close the curtain now.

But I can’t. Not yet.

Because someone, somewhere, will read the headlines tomorrow:

“Author and Lover Found Dead in River.”

They will cluck their tongues, sip their tea, and say, “How selfish. How romantic. How foolish.” They will turn the page and forget us by morning.

No. I won’t let them. If I am to vanish, let me at least carve my shadow on the wall of your mind. Let me whisper my confessions into your ear like a dying lover.

If you want to know how I became a man who sought death in a lover’s arms… listen.