Letters to my Narcissus

Narcissus, Narcissus, Narcissus:

You told me you are leaving, you are going to the ocean and you will get lost for eight to ten months and Narcissus, I am begging you not to leave, you cannot leave. It’s unfair and insane that you leave when we still need each other. Don't do this to me that, you're still in my system.

I tried to cry for us by la Avenida Independencia but you know that since the first of June I run out of tears for us. I cry what I had when you told me that you loved me and my response choked in my throat with what felt like a tumour that wanted out.

Damn it, you have no right to leave with my joy and my heart, tell me that there is a way, a price and two hundred wishes to give. I’ll do it as long as you stay by my side so tell me that if I asked you, you would say yes.

Narcissus, you can't, it's too long and our three years are nothing compared to the 24-weeks you’ll be gone. I wouldn't survive it without talking about you and preaching your good days.

Put me in your suitcase, I will hide like a stowaway or as oxygen to go in your lungs. I do not fear that you will forget me (although I do), I fear that my heart, the poor abused and mistreated, won’t beat after you.

Do not make me your Echo, stay for a while by my side, do not do it as a bandit, give me the forty-eight hours you have left and flood me with your presence. 

To keep you as a ghost is better than oblivion.

I know, God I know it’s late and slow, that they are words buried in children and youth. That this page is erased from your mind because I begged you, but remember and find me.

Narcissus, no, just no.

I love you

Stay.

Come back. 

Do not leave Me.

T.A.

Modernity

My love, Instagram is the enemy with its retouched photos and you with that girl.

It is the poison in my soul. 

That's why I am preparing my bags and going to the mountains. 

Away from you, the city and society.

I need to breathe and erase the notion of her smile on your neck and her name on your lips.

I will throw the cell phone in the first bin that I cross and I will eliminate my existence from this world.

Because I can’t. 

It's impossible to continue if you're present.

So, My love, Facebook is the ally and I must go ahead with deleting my account and losing your number of my skin.

This has to end with my tears to the sea and my wounds closed in the heat of the sun.

I have to erase the kisses of my soul and burn WhatsApp that has your audios as midnight ghosts.

I will go to the ancient towers and read about the end of the world in bible paper.

Because, My love, enough is enough.

This is no longer karma, it is evil and I hate the universe more than Wi-Fi for giving me your presence.

T.A.

Sleep

I fell asleep with good intentions, the taste of expectations and desires in my bones. I had an optimistic mechanism and there were no barriers to my goals, I was a non-stop machine.

This was an hour, fifteen days ago,

I woke up with a cramp in my muscles, with no friends to turn to and apathy with bread flavour.

It's not that everything was lost, it's that everything was meaningless. It was money for love and relationships, smiles for words, good answers for one-hour conversations. And today it is a solitude of twenty-four hours of the eight days of the week if you do not have the trade to sell yourself.

I haven't dreamed for days and weeks. That existing is a to breathe every five hours and there is a letter that is burning my pockets.

People care when there is profit and decisions are made in doubt. As I said I fell asleep with a smile on my lips and my heart chasing the hummingbird. But now that is an illusion of the desperate.

T.A.

Lonely Sunday

There will be a Sunday night that while your friends upload a photo of their Saturday. And you have the cell phone in silence and Whatsapp is a simple distraction. 

That you will doubt your youth, since there is no car race, nor do you have a kiss on the lips and less the cries of a laugh.

You are in front of the TV with the repeat of a series of the 90s and the books are marked on the same page. And it is a classic to question whether the minutes of your twenties are a waste in you. Maybe you should be among an ocean of strangers and sending messages every hour with a different story. Perhaps the world would open before your feet if you challenged it with a night out.

You think about it in the silence of a few seconds of the old and racist joke, you entertain it when the book has already lost its appeal.

However, you know that you are bored and that the outside night is not your environment. People drink too much and smile when they shouldn't. They talk about Tini and tennis and don't know about the end of the world. Music has no meaning just as lights hurt your eyes. And there will be a city waiting to consume your life, however, you are fine with your cat on the feet and the sound of the keyboard.

T.A.

2 Silent treatments

2

I returned to the house an hour and a half later.

My father was waiting for me at the entrance, sitting in a chair with the newspaper open. I let Koi go to my room and headed for the kitchen when he grabbed my arm, a strong and cold grip.

"Where were you?"

They had taught me the trick of counting to ten, and if it didn’t work to add ten more and ten more, and so on. 

That should help control, they said. To think and say what they wanted. It was bullshit, so I fixed my gaze to the photos hanging on the wall and numbered the reasons why they were my parents.

I thought of good reasons, remembered better moments and exhaled.

"I went to the plaza"

He let go of my arm and I went to the kitchen. 

I knew he was following me because I heard the newspaper creak with the dragging of his steps. I saw the closed door of the study and the raised voice of my mother who seemed to argue with a client, my father grabbed me by the shoulder, once again. And without looking at me he said it, with the same emptiness and fear.

"We worry about you"

I grabbed the glass with juice, some cookies and went to my room.

I had taken the pills, adhering the sleeping pills. 

Thus waking up at 3 in the morning, when my parents pretended to sleep instead of still working and reading. 

With Koi, we went to the kitchen to find the dish that my mother had left me in the microwave. I put the TV as background noise and shared dinner with the dog, I stayed for an hour and a half watching the characters move on television with the annoyance of the ads. 

Wanting to silence the memories of my mind and not think about what day it was. I went back to my room, took another sleeping pill and closed my eyes. Wanting to run away from that day.

Miranda and Miguel.

The kids with the marked cheekbones, dark circles and baggy clothes. They were sitting at one of the tables in the corner, muttering under their breath and separated by a breath.

I was three chairs away from them. They had lost eyes and lips that moved fast. They ran their hands through their dead hair and did not sit still, uncomfortable in the seats. 

In the eyes that did not look at them, I used to observe them because they were one of the few who did not respond violently to observing and that was a slow day to just watch them talk.

"I think we don't know each other, I'm Giselle, and you?"

Giselle. 

She was sweet, she was the flower in spring and the sugar on the coffee, she was the joy and colours in that building.

There were kind, bitter, selfish and abusive people however she was the rays in the dark, from which we fed. That didn't mean she was dumb. 

She was cunning and fast, not asking questions but listening.

Nor was she blind to when people tried to eavesdrop, she knew the definition of privacy. And it was not difficult to tell her the secrets she was looking for.

Yet, with me she wanted to talk about Sebastian. Without explanations, without saying his name, our conversations revolved around him. In small favours requested and without any given reason.

“Could you give him this jelly? he is not eating and if he doesn’t they will force him and I know he does not want that. Tell him it’s lima, his favourite ”

She left me with two while handing out the twelve o'clock pills. By the time I woke up, it was already past four in the morning and I took two steps at the time.

He was there, he had brought a blanket with him because of the cold that was getting worse in those parts of the country. 

I approached him and left him the jelly next to his feet, by the time I was finishing mine, he grabbed his and started eating, as if he had verified their situation. That night we stayed a little beyond the first rays, taking advantage of the extra hours they gave us to sleep during the cold days.

We were on the stairs, going down slowly. He was two steps behind me and keeping the distance. The sheet lifted the dirt from the steps and neither of us cared. I was thinking about how I should cut my hair that was already covering my eyes and how was that Sebastian's was always the same. With the tips cut and with a slight shine under the stars. 

I was thinking about the need for a private shower where I could take a shower for thirty minutes without people following me with questions and fears. 

In the need of colors other than white, blue, Gise's red and Sebastian's black. I thought of every little detail that could distract me from the silence:

"What do you know about euthanasia?”

Neck perspiration, fist-shaped hands, a twinge in legs, agitated breathing. Blankets on the floor and Koi was barking. The hurried steps, the door that opened and arms that held me and everything went too fast. 

A cold shower, then hot, the conversation on the phone, the words:

"Natural"

“Possible abuse of sleeping pills”

“Be careful"

That day my parents took turns staying by my side, I was forbidden of being close to sharp objects, couldn’t be alone, couldn’t leave, couldn’t breathe and Koi was in the yard.

Always far and my parents didn't talk, they watched. 

They passed me food and water, and the door of the room remained open. I didn't sleep that day, I still had the echo of the question.

It was Monday, they couldn't help going to work and they weren't going to ask Micaela to watch after me. She already had a job and they didn't want the rumours, the suspicions, so they just left me with rules to follow and warnings for every action.

They left quickly, with kisses on the forehead, a look through my arms, my neck, my body and they left.

Micaela was immersed in her work so she didn't notice when I grabbed Koi and left the house. I took the road opposite to the square and walked twenty blocks to where the house with the black gate and the entrance park was. 

I grabbed the mail they had at the entrance and rang the bell, it was Karen who let me in, she had turned six years ago three weeks ago, she was taller, with two pigtails, scraped knees and shorts with a big shirt:

"Lucas!"

From there it took about ten minutes to have the whole family around me. The three-year-old twins, Marcos and Lucia. Behind them, with grey hair in their hair, dark circles disappearing and being replaced by nostalgia. Summer dresses and sleeves rolled up, Martin and Juliet:

"It's good to see you, Lucas, how are you?"

And it was to fall into a comfort, in security and custom, with homemade food, the noises during the children's lunch, Martin's laugh and Juliet's voice that kept order.

It was a happy family, with a perfectly maintained extra chair.

“We wanted to go to visit you but they only allowed family and your parents…”

My parents didn't want witnesses, they still blamed the rest, still wanted distance because they thought my pain was still on them. My parents envied the Bruhl family, and they didn't have to say more.

We were sitting on the edge of the pool, the children taking a nap while we discussed the lost year. 

The difficulties I could not face with them, and they did not judge, they understood. There wasn’t a problem, there was an absence.

“What do you plan to do?"

And that was the question the people had left me with. The one that my parents hadn’t asked yet. That of the last stars of a warm night, that of black clothes and rainy days, the one behind my door. That question that was in every corner of my mind.

"I don’t know"

And that could be the most honest answer I had said since the first question of strangers, parents and whiteness.

The dishevelled hair, dark circles, long fingers and stretched shirt. With a nervous tic on the legs, he sat opposite of me. In the circle that they had made us assemble, he was biting the skin of his hands and he would look to me and smile:

"So, how is he?"

He looked at me with his eyes moving. In the windows, in the people who walked and on the floor. We were going to the backyard, Gise had passed and had given him three pills that he swallowed them with eyes closed and the answer to sticking out his tongue, giving up, once more, independence and privacy:

"He's quiet"

We had reached the patio chairs, where people no longer went out because of the cold that was rising. He sat in front of me, with his legs to his chest and his arms hanging:

"Yes, I think nobody has ever heard him speak"

“It is a way to end a life when you are tired when there are no solutions. But only when you are very sick, when you cannot, or want more. It is a choice that is in the person who asks for it ”

We had been sitting in the cold of the night for three hours. We had both brought blankets to cover us up, and this time we had jelly with cookies. Which seemed homemade, there were three and Sebastian had given me one.

"I never see you the morning, why is that?"

It was snowing, it wasn't the first one, there was already a blanket of snow in nature, letting it sleep, and leaving us on with white in the exterior as the interior.

On those nights we were both sitting at a distance of three steps to my left. Under the only protection that was on the terrace and there were tremors in our body, red noses, with pale breathing in the dark and the darkest blue we had seen. 

It was difficult but it was our only freedom and peace of the days we lived.

His voice was still hoarse and difficult to understand.

"It's when I can sleep because I'm alone"

He told me one night, he didn't explain it to me although he let me understand that for him. That we were more than two but less than three. I saw his gaze lost at fixed points and I knew he was telling, in his belief, the truth.

I had arrived at the house before my parents and a few minutes before Micaela had to leave. From there it was Koi and me, sitting in the calm of the heart of the house, with cookies and music at a low volume.

We were sunbathing, at four in the afternoon, with our eyes closed and attentive to the noises of the garage door opening. The car doors closing, the studs on the stairs, the sighs, and it took them about fifteen minutes to call my name:

"Present!"

From there it was doors closing behind each other and once again it was Koi, music, nature and me. We stayed outside until the sun went down and my mother called me for dinner. 

She gave me the pills, and the conversation at the table was about their work, about my passing of the day, the tranquility in the same events of the day. When we were raising the table, moving slowly, knowing our positions and steps well, I stopped between them, and looked anxiously at the ceiling

“I was thinking that I could do something, start a job, see faculties or something”

It was silence, it was dishes resting on the countertops, the TV turned off. Until my father rebooted the sound by washing the dishes, my mother stopped at the kitchen door

"No, it's too soon."

I was going to insist, I was going to do it, I had the words ready, even when the mind was in doubt, even with my hands perspiring and anxious. 

I knew I had to take the next step, I opened my mouth and she left. My father, my father who had finished cleaning the dishes, put his hand on my shoulder:

“She is right, you just came out, not yet, maybe in a few months"

By morning my parents were gone, leaving behind reminders of the rules and words that felt empty. 

The morning passed in shadows and lights on the wall of my room. There was the noise of the dishes, of Koi barking, of the broom, the steps of Micaela and the washing machine. I closed my eyes even though my mind stayed awake, and my fingers played with an envelope of spent sugar.

At one point the bell was heard with the distant but close voices, the steps, the stairs, the knock on the door and the voice of Micaela. 

It took me ten minutes to register, hurried steps, two-step at the time, open doors, scraping my bare feet against the asphalt, looking left and right but there was no one with agitated breathing and Micaela's voice in my mind :

"A girl passed by, she said she knew you, Gisele I think she said her name was"

I returned to the house in search of Micaela, who was in my parents' room setting up the bed.

"Did she tell you what she wanted?"

She paused a few seconds, thinking, then she continued working and I was by the doorframe waiting. I heard the arrival of the car and the opening of the garage, she looked at me again:

“Oh, yes, she asked me to let you know that the visiting hours are from ten in the morning to fifteen in the afternoon. That they are waiting for you ”

T.A.

After

After you, I didn't exist.

(I was on the highest balcony, drowning in cold water the bathtub, the bottle out of the closet and my skin was fighting to keep your touch.)

After you, there wasn’t.

(I was with the sheets stained in tears, the ink wasted in a toxic love, the cigarette burning my skin while flowers burnt my throat and the moon had taken the night off.)

What followed you didn’t happen.

(He told me that he loved me and I laughed at his face while spitting blood on the sidewalk, I lay down on a crossroad and wrote your name in the streets, ran a race with a drunk with burned knees and the clock didn’t matter)

The next step was raw despair.

(Midnight calls, my voice breaking, shouting your existence three roofs from yours, punching with white knuckles while vomiting on the stairs and asking for you.)

Then it was torture.

T.A.

Dead love

In the bathtub with the sharp knife, the lights are off yet the light still enters. And the decision is in the cold of the metal with the heat of the skin, and you swear that you feel the blood run through your veins.

You close your eyes

There is a satisfaction that you have an emotion, you are frightened and trembling, that you feel. You must have purple lips from biting them, and it is the great drum roll.

You must inhale to start with the fall of the last curtain, it will be seconds to minutes. Where the mind has its last card to play, the last deceit of the sick magician.

From Miguel and Lucia to the five-year-old sister and the stranger on the street. The pain is no longer because of death but for the living.

And the knife is still pressed on your skin.

However, there is your mother dressed in black with your brothers talking at midnight saying that you mattered to them. 

Your friend, who had no words to stop you, now sits on the edge of your balcony on the sixth floor. There are tears on your only pet and the person that you liked is talking in laments of you. And they are black in tears, wounds in the soul and a step of following. These are the ones you loved as they loved you.

And you do not tremble, there is no fear in your bones by sliding the knife in the right arm.

However, with the mist and sleeping of the muscles, you still do not reach your left.

To the heart.

Because the love, of strangers, of abuse, of torment, of the friend of five years and one month, would be destroyed in your abandonment.

And the suicides are brave with closed eyes and a plea hidden in their lips for their loves. But we are cowards who bite our lips with tears while the left arm bleeds.

T.A.

1 Silent treatments

1

Everything comes back in flashbacks, like a movie's trailer

It starts with the sound of the turning off a medical monitor, an envelope of sugar. The white colour that flooded all the scenes, there was white on the fingers, on the clothes, in nature, in life. 

And talking. 

There was constant talk. Which couldn’t be differentiated, people shouting, muttering lies and telling truths. It was a headache, of several scenes that I couldn’t comprehend and remember. I was drowning in the small moments, and what remained was an echo. 

The name, his name, Thaddeus.

That was the anchor in this story, he was everywhere and nowhere. The trigger for where I was standing at the moment. 

Outside.

I had been given a slapped on the back, a bag of pills and a goodbye. Without explanations or rules to follow. 

I had been standing outside for ten minutes, the doors behind me closed and with an explosion of colours in my eyes. 

I could see my parents in the car waiting; the impatient hands of my mother and the fixing of her glasses. My father with the constant checking of his watch and their discomfort of the matter. They hadn’t left the car, didn’t want any attention or to leave evidence of the events of the last year and this day. 

With my hood up and my fingers playing with a blue envelope of sugar, I headed towards them and we left. Through the back streets and the route, seven hours of travel to reach three towns away from where we left.

We entered the house in silence and lunch was with the typical repetitions of: 

"Pass me the salt, please" 

"Nice food"

And, my personal favourite 

"Bon appetit" 

From there each of us went to their corner of the house.

I stayed in my room that seemed caught in time. With the photos cut and burned, paint against the wall and dust on every part of it. 

I lay down to see the roof,  the green, red, black and brown. It was bathed in colours and I wondered if I knew. 

If I knew where I was going, of the white I still saw when I closed my eyes, the one in my clothes and on the walls. Of the colour that drowned me. 

And my hand pressed the sugar envelope harder and the name Thaddeus came back to my mind.

"He is refusing to eat again"

They were the first words I heard when I entered the whiteness of the building. My parents had left in a hurry with only a pat on the back and a kiss on the forehead. 

“How many days have passed?”

I was waiting in front of the reception, having ringed.

“Fifteen”

The nurse appeared quickly and with a smile attached to her face, with empty eyes and long fingers. 

She had a white uniform with the red of her hair being the first colour of other than white upon entering. 

By the time she let me go I only got the chance to catch the end of my previous eavesdropping: 

“If by tomorrow he continues like this, we will have to take extreme measures. I suppose we are talking about Baraviera?” 

It was followed by a yes and then they were walking away.

I had fallen asleep in the armchairs. 

It was already three in the morning and the only noise in the house was that of the refrigerator. I had a Ginsberg book resting on my chest when I woke up with a sharp pain in my back.

The movement of the arms hurt as breathing felt an effort that I did not intend to win. Hunched over and with the fear of my petrification, I felt the sticky cold in the back of my head and neck.

And I remembered the running of hurried steps, the signs on the walls, the sunken eyes and the muted laughter with the chairs that were pushed harder and faster. Trees that were almost touched, and we were so close. 

In my mouth, I had the taste of a nightmare. 

I opened all the windows on the first floor because I could not breathe. The nightmare repeated in my brain and the air did not enter my lungs. My skin pressed my muscles, organs, the air and oxygen did not reach my brain anymore. 

I didn’t feel the beat of my heart, my lips were dry and the word help was locked on my lips. I was frightened with trembling in the knees yet the cold wind of the night brought back memories of young and pure nights.

(It had been luck.)

On the third night of nightmares, uncomfortable beds and screams from my neighbours, I took a walk.

Exhausted I walked through the empty tables with the chairs occupied by three people. I went through the corridors that had no doors and for those who did, they were open doors without occupants. 

Most of the closed doors were silent and with a small window in the middle. Yet there were a few that trembled. That voices were heard behind them, with the steps of coming and going in a space too small and the creaking of an old bed.

In a moment of looking at the feet, of avoiding the Bang, Bang, Bang of a door. I got distracted and I found myself at the last door of the stairs. Three floors above where I was, and I wanted to try, wanted the cold air.

Yet in a plot twist, it gave with a single push and there it was. 

The open sky, dancing lights in the blue sea and a single lonely moon to the left of me. And it was beautiful, it was colours, it was life. 

I kept walking until I sat down, without preamble and grace. I watched the stars that shine and illuminated my eyes. The blue that woke my brain asleep in the white they had given me about three hours ago, and in watching, I saw him.

Sitting, ten steps ahead of me, back against the edge, head resting on the wall facing the stars.

"Ah, I didn't know there was someone else here”

The nights were passing by in the sea of whiteness and the constant questions. They were an echo that kept me awake.

Between three in the morning and at half-past ten of the night, regardless of the weather and schedule, the boy would be on the roof. In the same position, the only change being the closing or opening of his grey eyes. 

But by then it had already become a routine. 

There were times I tried to start a conversation. In telling the lies I heard from people and the truths of my neighbours. In explaining the death of a star and the colour blue.

There were other times where we were silent. Looking at the stars, thinking we knew the constellations and listening to the noise of the night. The cars did not pass at that time, but the bugs lived, the wind ran through the trees and the night was the salvation of every day.

There were two nights in which I didn't go, believing that I would not make a change. On a whim. 

Anger that never I came to understand, as well as wanting to prove a theory that had not been developed.

I spent sixteen hours of those days watching the movement of the shadows in my room. And two hours hidden in the sheets by the constant knocking on the door of someone who never answered.

"Why are you here?"

The voice was hoarse, broken and worn. You had to doubt when you heard it and check the movement of his lips. 

It was the sound of old age, of the hidden in his voice, there was a sadness, a despair. 

I stood stargazing by the door believing that I had imagined it until I felt his eyes on me.

"Depression, you?"

I sat down in front of him, at a distance of five steps, he kept watching me and I was looking forward to the answer. 

Knowing that my theory was wrong and that the past two nights had made a change, I was waiting to see the lips move again and listen to the breaking of a glass.

However, he shrugged and looked at the stars. Yet, I wanted, needed, to know more because he had become more than an obsession and a distraction. 

He was the boy with whom I could be in peace, that I could breathe. 

That night we stayed until the first rays of the sun until we could feel the heat entering our bones. 

And without realizing it, I had ended up accompanying him to his room. Where he looked at me, waved at me and closed the door in my face.

"What are you doing?”

I had Koi by my side.

(The street dog I had adopted a year and a half ago. Who in an attempt of bribe from my parents was still in the house. 

Although he could only be in my room or in the corners of the park, and never where my parents were)

My mother was sitting in the armchair of her study, with some papers on her legs and her glasses resting in her hair. She was looking at me surely calculating the risk of the keys and the strap in my hands.

"Taking Koi for a walk"

I had trained the dog to behave in the presence of my parents. And that was why he was sitting at my left waiting with me for my mother to make a decision regarding what she believed was correct. 

I heard the tick-tock and my father swimming in the pool, she turned the page, put on the glasses.

“Well, but come back in an hour”

We ended up in the square. Fifteen blocks from my house, the one of the tall trees, grass with wildflowers and the marked paths. 

In a corner, in a circle of trees is where we were, somewhat rusty, faded and there were only three that could still be of use. 

I let Koi run free and sat in one of them. I began to sway gently, with the tips of my feet raising the dust and keeping my eyes on the sky. 

I listened to the barking of the dogs, the cars passing by and the sound of the leaves. I began to go faster, pushing with my whole body and stretching my legs. Wanting to reach the treetops. Laughing freely, with every peak that I conquered.

I was the only one in them and I listened to the cracking of my weight in them. I was going faster, with a vacuum in my stomach, and the wind in my ears. My feet touched the branches that stretched from the trees, and I flew.

I flew between the white and fluffy clouds, in the blue sky of midday and the green branches of summer. And I felt the salty tears on my lips, the sting of sadness in my eyes, and suddenly, I was down. 

With the chair moving, but my head in my hands, my body shaking.

We still met at night although we hadn’t talked again. We kept the same routine of the stars and the night. 

The change came fifteen days later by arriving earlier one night to find the door close. And when I  came back later the door was open and he was sitting down. I was going to ask but he had his eyes closed and it was peaceful to see him, with his mouth slightly open, his chest moving and his hands resting on his stretched legs. 

So I kept quiet, watching the stars, watching him. 

I woke him after the first ray of sun, he moved away from my touch with fear in his eyes.

It wasn't until we were on the floor of his room that he stopped.

"What is your name?"

Old and cracked voice, which lacked water. He had his head down and hands in his white pants pockets.

"Lucas, you?"

I waited, even as he walked away and it wasn't that I expected a response but I didn't expect silence either. 

I turned my back on him,  I had decided to stop waiting:

“Sebastian”

The next morning I met Giselle, a young woman who was doing her internship in that God-forsaken place. 

She was a freshman in psychology and was one of the few who sat down to socialize with us without wanting an answer to questions we didn’t understand. She was the girl in charge of distributing medicine to those who did not leave their room.

I was listening to the conversation that two boys in their thirties were having in front of me when I was once more a witness to a peculiar conversation.

We were heading to the garden door in the east wing that in turn faced Sebastian's door, and I found Giselle inside. She was leaving the pills on the table while sitting next to him.

"Today is a beautiful day, don't you want to go out?"

He looked out the window. My friends were walking away and I was following them when I caught a few lost words.

“Today we talk about you with Thaddeus”