For a month or so after I confessed my feelings to Ezra, everything was as perfect as it could be. Pretty much all of my life up to that point, there was always this feeling of background unhappiness underscoring each moment, and it was so unusual to have it replaced with a background joy that seeped into every crack of my existence. We were together whenever we could find the time, but it never seemed to wear thin. Our conversations kept unfolding and our connection and admiration for each other only grew deeper, as if we had scratched away the surface attraction that bonded us and discovered a vast ocean underneath, begging to be explored. I was truly content, for the first and last time in my life.

Then, on that fateful day, I came to school and instantly noticed something was off. Ezra met me at the gate as he always does, but he seemed distant, as if he no longer belonged to the world around him. When I looked into his eyes, all I could see was a profound sadness.

I immediately asked him what was wrong, but he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say. His broken voice begged me to follow him as far away from Academy grounds as possible, somewhere we could be alone. I was well aware that I would get in trouble with my parents when the headmaster informed them I had missed an entire day of classes. But I also recognized that this was something serious. Ezra’s well-being was far more important to me than staying on my teachers’ good side.

We took a tram to Strona’s city hall, and from there rode the funicular up to the highest level of the city. At that point, the only way up the hills was by treading an abandoned hiking path. We walked for what seemed like ages, the sounds of people and vehicles fading from a distant echo into complete silence. Neither of us said a word until we reached an isolated spot at the foot of a sharp incline that led all the way to the highest mountain peaks overlooking the city. A few lonely pine trees dotted the clearing, separated from the evergreen forest covering the slope. The view was spectacular; had a hideous tension not permeated the air, the whole experience would have been quite soothing.

“Ezra,” I said quietly, facing him. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m going to kill myself,” he said with a calmness that made the words all the more terrifying.

A shiver ran down my spine. I stared at him blankly for what felt like forever until he spoke up again.

“I’m telling you because I want you to know what happened to me. I couldn’t bear the thought of you waking up tomorrow with me gone and wondering what went wrong.”

“Wait, why!?” I cried, tears welling up in my eyes.

“I don’t really know how, but my father found out about you. Not about you explicitly, just that I’m with a boy.” He began to unbutton the jacket of his school uniform patiently, top to bottom like good boys do. When he took it off, I could only gaze in shock at the countless bruises covering his arms, ugly blotches of various hues of purple and yellow against his pale skin. He then pulled back the collar of his white shirt, and another bruise appeared on his chest, this one a dark shade of crimson.

“This is from last night,” he said, his voice beginning to break. “The beatings are nothing new. It’s how he always punishes me. But I had never seen him as angry as he was yesterday. Before I left for school this morning, he said that he would kill me if I set foot into the house again. So, I’m already dead, essentially.”

“What are you talking about!?” I shouted, my voice cracking. “How are you even going to…”

As if he knew what I was going to ask, Ezra pulled something out of his bag before I could finish my sentence. It was an antique revolver. Had I seen it on any other occasion, I would’ve been stunned by the beauty of its hand carved wooden grip panel. Then and there, it just filled me with dread.

“This was that twisted man’s idea of a gift for my fifteenth birthday. I never thought I’d make use of it.”

“No,” I whimpered, wishing with every fiber of my being that I was about to wake up from a nightmare.

“The time I spent with you was the best part of my life Archie,” Ezra said gently, a tear running down his cheek. “I love you. I truly do.”

“No!” I screamed.

“Don’t worry, I won’t do it in front of you. You’ll leave and then I’ll… take care of it.”

“No!!! You’re not doing this!” I howled, my throat burning. “I know you feel like there’s no other way out of this… But I won’t let you do it! We can escape!”

“Escape where, Archie?”

“Anywhere! I’ll take you anywhere! I’ll get a job, we’ll rent a place and we’ll start building a life together! You can stay at my house until we figure out the details! Please! Anything…” I begged, my face red underneath thick streams of tears. “Anything but this.”

Hope flickered across Ezra’s face as he began to sob.

“You would do that for me?”

“I would do anything for you,” I said with all the strength I could muster at that point. “Because I love you too! And I can’t imagine a world without you.”

Ezra’s head and shoulders slumped, his whole body now trembling in sync with his sobs. I recognized an opening and knew I had to make use of it.

“Will you please give me the gun?” I said in the calmest, most comforting voice I could manage in a situation like that.

For a few horrifying moments, he just stood motionless before me, still staring down at the ground. Finally, he stretched the arm holding the gun towards me. He faced me again, a barely visible smile on his lips. I rushed forward, cusped his hand and carefully took the revolver.

We stood like that, hand in hand and incredulously staring at each other, for a small eternity. And then, suddenly, we both started laughing through the tears. It seemed like the only reasonable thing to do in such an absurd situation – nothing else would’ve done it justice.

When we managed to calm down, I took a step back and attempted to unload the gun. But as I reached for the cylinder with my sweaty, shaking fingers, I fumbled, and the revolver slipped out of my hand. My anxiety suddenly took control of me, and my hands began to fiddle around frantically, desperate to get a solid grip on the gun. The next thing I knew, one of my fingers clumsily snagged the trigger, and a loud shot pierced the silence.

Time froze for me. My heart sank like a brick in a lake. I could feel every muscle in my face contort my features into something that I would never want to see in a mirror.

I somehow brought myself to divert my eyes from the revolver to Ezra. He was standing in front of me, eyes wide, mouth slightly ajar, the white fabric on his chest stained a deep red. I stared, hopelessly expecting for the image before me to change. He just slumped to his knees, the expression of shock on his face unchanged, and then fell to the ground motionless.

Every horrifying realization of what I had just done sank in at once. My skin suddenly felt like some vile prison I desperately wanted to break out of. I started slipping in and out of awareness, the world around me becoming a blur. In a moment of clarity, my mind focused on the one thing that could release me from this situation.

I still had a gun in my hand.

I placed the muzzle of the revolver against my temple. For a moment I hesitated, but then I convinced myself to pull the trigger.

Nothing happened.

One more try. Still nothing.

I removed the cylinder, which took me somewhere in the neighborhood of forever due to my mental state, only to find that it was empty. There was only one bullet. Of course there was. One bullet was all it would take – why bring more? It was such an Ezra thing to do. Bring only what was sufficient and nothing else.

I dropped to my knees and threw the gun as far away from me as possible, angry at it for letting me down. “What now?” I asked myself. “You could jump,” a voice in my head offered grimly. “There’s good elevation here. You’d be just a smudge on the ground in no time. Or you could drown. Slit your wrists. Jump in front of a tram. The possibilities are limitless.”

But with every option presented to me, I could feel another, weak voice cut through the darkness and meekly repeat “I don’t want to die.” Whatever part of me that voice was coming from, it had a stubborn enough self-preservation instinct to hold on to life even while my whole body wanted to just stop existing. I cursed myself. Ezra was dead and I was still alive – and that’s how it would stay because I was too weak to do deliberately what I had just done by accident.

I don’t know how long I remained in this state; time becomes a secondary concern when you’re stuck in your head. But I do remember that, once I seemingly became numb to the pain, the extended implications of what I just did began to surface from the depths of my mind. I was a murderer. The body will be found, the police will investigate, and in the end I’ll probably go to jail for a long time.

“Good,” my dark inner voice popped up yet again. “You deserve to rot away in a cell for the rest of your life for what you did. You should turn yourself in and speed up the process.”

And again, the same scared little voice from before somehow slipped through the cracks. “I don’t want to go to jail.” I hated that voice. I hated it because it was selfish, looking out only for itself. It was scared of death, scared of punishment, scared of everything. And again I knew I would listen to it, because I couldn’t bring myself to do what needed to be done. I was filled by an endless self-loathing, disgusted by myself down to the very last atom.

The body had to be hidden, that much I knew. My muscles seemed to act on their own, running on pure instinct. I threw the gun over the edge of the plateau, into the wilderness, and then began dragging Ezra up the slope, into the forest. As I pulled him by his arms, his face seemed to look at me in horror, still frozen in that moment of realization that I had shot him. I’d wanted to turn him on his stomach but what was left of my decency forbade it. I didn’t want his face to be dragged in the dirt, soiled and bruised by the rocks and twigs.

“Besides, it’s better this way,” I thought to myself. “You don’t deserve to make this situation any easier on you. Look at his face every step of the way. This is what you have done.”

Once I had slipped into the forest, I became aware of the fact that I don’t really have a plan. What was I going to do? I couldn’t just leave Ezra on the ground. I couldn’t bury him either – it would take ages without tools and coming back later to do the job was far too risky. I began to pant deeply, exhausted both physically and mentally. There was no way out of the mess I was in.

Just then, I noticed something in the distance. My eyes attempted to focus on the image and, once I was certain it wasn’t some sort of mirage born out of my insanity, I carried on forward, still dragging the body of the man I loved with me.

I eventually arrived at the rest area. It was probably made with hikers in mind but had obviously not been used by anyone in an awfully long time. The wooden benches and table were rotted from moisture. Blankets of moss had covered their surfaces and ferns were growing all around them – nature had already reclaimed them. But my eyes immediately shifted to something else, something that could be of use in my current situation.

There was a well here. All the wooden parts had crumbled to the passage of time, left in shards around the well itself. The windlass and bucket were nowhere to be seen, the bricks covered with lichens. I threw a nearby rock inside: it disappeared into the darkness and landed with a dull thud. There was no water inside, and it was deep enough for the bottom to be invisible.

“Might as well do it now,” the voice in my head spoke. “It’s as good a place as any to relieve your filthy conscience.”

Getting the body into the well was a more challenging task than I could’ve expected. First, I had to sit Ezra against the wall. Then I used every ounce of strength I had to lift and position him across the edge of the well. His legs were limply hanging towards the ground while his upper body and head dangled above the hole. I was gripping him on both sides, preparing to push him into the well, and this gave me an all too close view of his head from a bottom angle, his eyes now peering into the sky with the expression of frozen horror still etched onto his face. It’s an image that will remain burned in my head until I die.

I didn’t want to let go. I didn’t want to push him into that cold, lonely abyss. But my cowardice had forced me into believing I had to. And I did, ugly tears running down my cheeks as his mangled form disappeared into the darkness, hitting the bottom with a sound that would end up taking a permanent place in my nightmares.

I sat down on the ground, my back leaning against the cold bricks, and the hours just melted away. I alternated between crying my eyes out and staring blankly into the distance. I wanted the world to stop just so I could try to regain my senses, but time went on mercilessly. Birds were chirping in the trees, and the sun moved slowly across the sky. I had to face the brutal fact that, despite feeling like an utterly broken shell of a human being, I had to rejoin everyday life.

So I stood up and walked away, not daring to look back. With a broken branch I swept across the debris of the forest floor to cover up the trace of a body being dragged. I descended from the plateau, slowly walking down the path leading back to the city.

The only thing I knew for sure was that nothing would ever be the same again.