It's February. After nearly four months in the hospital, Ivo is allowed to go home. He was discharged with a new cane and a mountain of medications, which may or may not be covered by insurance. He’d rather have died than end up like this. He learned a lot in rehabilitation, and regained use of his arms and legs, but has weak finger mobility, and has been in pain since arriving at the hospital. The medical team says he’s fortunate to have survived without a serious spinal injury. It doesn’t matter. He falls when he walks, and drops things he tries to hold, and wakes up in the middle of the night feeling as though all of his body is on fire.

Outside the hospital, Rio helps him buckle into the passenger seat. This makes him feel like a baby. Ivo looks the same as he did before. Doctors never care about their patients. We’re all just a face and a body, with nothing personal about us. Like everyone else, doctors only work because they have to survive a life they didn’t ask for anyway. Ivo nearly died on the way to the hospital. He remembers feeling very warm, pained, and dazed, and then waking up to machines beeping loudly and paramedics shouting his name. There are no paramedics in the Netherlands.

“We’re here,” says Rio, parking outside of the mobile home. “What do you want to do now that you’re free?” Although home is better than the hospital, there’s no point in living if you’re miserable. Everything hurts. Ivo’s fingers are numb and tingly, so that he struggles to open the door and get out of the car.

Rio won’t leave. Ivo could mistreat him as badly as he wanted, and Rio would put up with it. He wants to prove a point, and Ivo isn’t too stupid to realize this. Rio calls him stubborn. Rio is the most stubborn man Ivo’s ever met.

Ivo stops outside the home. In his hospital bag, he’s got painkillers, muscle relaxants, antidepressants. It all seems like too much. It’s likely he’ll need to take these forever. He could have died in the hospital, and nobody would have cared. People always pretend to care, because nobody can bear to be disliked, and so nobody can bear to dislike anyone else. Most of the time, nobody ever cares about you until you’re dead.

A few days after leaving the intensive care unit, Ivo fought with a nurse. After this, he never saw her again.

“Why do you always have to be so difficult, Ivo? You need to talk to people like they’re people, and not just corporate slaves.”

That’s all anybody is, though. A corporate slave. People work for million dollar companies, insisting on being treated as though they’re royalty, refusing to pay workers what their labor is worth. Ivo hates the wealthy, and he hates the poor just the same.

This morning, he needed help getting dressed. It’s stupid to admit your feelings to people. Rio is in love with him, apparently. He’s a dipshit. Ivo could make Rio do whatever he wanted. “Fuck off. I don’t need your help.” He’s been speaking to people this way for so long that, these days, he can’t speak to anyone any other way.

Aspen and Ciel are home. Neither have come outside to acknowledge Ivo. His space hasn’t been cleaned in months, and still feels tidy. It’s cold and cloudy outside. Ivo struggles to maneuver his things inside the shed, and nobody comes to help. Rio scuffs his feet on the ground. He never does what he’s told. He shouts at Ivo in terrible Dutch, so painfully American.

“What are you so afraid of?”

They say if you love someone, you should let them go. But nobody ever talks about what happens if they don’t come back. When he was younger, he played sports like hockey and soccer with a small group of neighborhood kids. But he was an angry and insolent child, and after a while, none of the other kids wanted to play with him. Rio makes him feel safe, and no one else ever has. That’s the scary part, though. Getting close to people means they can leave, and it will hurt, and you can scream and beg them not to go, and it won’t make a difference.

It’s cowardly to leave the people who love you without saying goodbye. It’s cowardly to leave the people who love you without thinking about how their lives will be fucked up because of it. Even if you realize your mistake, it’s too late. It’s too late the second you shut the door behind you. It takes years to build up a person’s trust. It takes a single second to break it completely. If you trust nobody, there’s nobody to let you down.

“I’m not afraid.” The burning always starts in his feet, and then shoots up his legs and up to his chest. Some days, it feels as though he’ll burn alive from the inside out. “I don’t need your pity, or to be taken care of like a fucking baby.” He turns, and stumbles, falling hands-first into the snow. It hurts, far more than it should. It makes Ivo’s fingers tingle and buckle.

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Rio touches his shoulders, squatting in the snow. He always smells good. He can make Ivo feel weak simply by touching him. “I think you’re afraid of getting hurt. You’re scared that if you get too close to someone, they’ll get tired and abandon you.” Rio is smug and vain. If he weren’t so hot, Ivo would have left ages ago. “Don’t you think, if I was going to get tired of you, I would have done it by now?”

It’s too bright outside. No one means a single thing, least of all Ivo.

“What makes you think I haven’t gotten tired of you?”

Ivo feels chilly, and tired. Rio touches his face, probably closer than he needs to be. He has thick hair that tickles Ivo’s arm, and holds him by the shoulders. “No one ever gets tired of me.” He’s an arrogant dick. His voice is low in Ivo’s ear, and makes him weak.

He frowns. “People only like you because you’re a jock, but you’re not even good at hockey, you know. If you weren’t an athlete, you’d be no one. Sports are all you have.” He’s superficial. He puts on a facade of being high and mighty because he can’t bear to be alone with himself for a single minute. And this makes a person weak. Maybe Ivo pities him. Maybe that’s why things changed.

Rio is very close to him. He claims not to care what other people think, but obsesses over being liked, as though it matters. “Is that why you like me? Because I’m a jock?”

If he’d never gotten involved with Rio in the first place, none of this would have happened. He’s probably never been criticized once in his life. Once you get close to someone, there’s no way for things to ever go back to the way they were. Ivo could insult Rio a hundred times, and nothing would change.

“I have never once said I like you.”

“You’ve never had to.”

Ivo’s tired. He sits on the ground, and can’t feel the chill of the snow underneath him. People like to say that feeling is important. Juno said that having feelings is how you know you’re alive. “You think everyone likes you because you’re popular and attractive. But you’re insecure, and you refuse to ever be alone so you don’t have to think about it, and people feel bad for you. All of your relationships are superficial and forced, all because you’re too scared to think about your life for two minutes.”

Though it was suggested by the medical team he keeps one on him all the time, Ivo won’t use a cane. He never used one before, and won’t now. It’s quiet. For the first time in a long time, Ivo misses home.

“Marry me.”

Pim used to say falling in love was for idiots and fools. He taught Ivo to be angry and hateful, and then he became the type of person he hated most. Ivo didn’t hate Pim. He pitied him, and this might be worse.

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

There’s no sensation left in Ivo’s toes. They drag when he walks, and can’t feel the ground. Sometimes it feels as though his foot has fallen asleep, and then the sensation lingers, until all of his fingers tingle. The sun hurts his eyes, even in the dead of winter. Pim had tinted glasses, too. When Ivo was a little boy, he thought his father was the world’s bravest man - and then he grew up.

Ivo has never really wondered what the world looks like. He sees things in detail inside his head, and doesn’t give a shit about anything else. Ivo never hated being blind until he met Rio. “Why the fuck do you think?” It’s getting dark. Ivo could sleep for days. “Because this is the only relationship you’ve ever had that makes you feel like a human being.”

Your heart can’t be broken if you don’t have one. This is something Pim used to say, and it stuck with Ivo through the years. Maybe there’s something worthwhile about being human. Maybe letting yourself feel something once in a while won’t kill you. It’s doubtful. Life means nothing, anyway. Nothing means anything. Ivo pitied his father, but he’s grown up to be just like him. Maybe in a way, Ivo pities himself, too.

There are no locks on the shed. No one ever comes out here.

“Okay.”

What did you like about my mom, anyway?

Nothing, really. She was just some girl, and I was lonely.

You can’t ever let yourself develop a relationship with anyone. Everyone always leaves, and then it’s like no one was ever there at all.

What a miserable life that must be: completely devoid of meaningful relationships, with no one but yourself to keep you company. Most people hate being alone. Most people would rather set themselves up for betrayal than keep their own company.

At one point in his life, Ivo cared to know about the lives of the people whose one-night stand led to his existence. At one point, he was convinced love had to exist for sex to exist. Children are stupid and unrealistic, and most don’t grow out of it. The problem with loneliness is that if it goes on long enough, your self-respect will disappear, and it will leave a big mess.