I drive my beautiful car out on the street, turn on the navigator and enter the address of the restaurant Tom mentioned to me. On the way there I realize that we must live pretty close to the center of Berlin, although it looked to me at first as if the villa was located somewhere in the outskirts.
It seems we are regular customers at the restaurant and I let Tom order to make sure I don´t look like a fool. All of a sudden there are memory flashes flooding my head and I see in front of my inner eye a picture of the same restaurant from the last time Tom and I had dined here together. I even remember the name of the waiter who served us. I´m so happy that I can´t control myself and on the first occasion I get, I call the waiter by his name. Stunned, Tom looks at me and I can see that he must be wondering where I got this information from.
„I hope that the thing you told me this morning wasn’t just one of your stupid jokes.“ He turns to me and with a serious face he hypnotizes me with his eyes. I assure him, that I had just a flash of the new memory and that he shouldn’t freak out about it. I better be careful what I say, because I don´t want to lose his trust. I realize, for him to believe all that I´ve been telling him must be very difficult.
Tom drives home from the restaurant and I watch the surroundings we are driving through to get at least a vague idea where we are. It looks quite nice here, it doesn´t even look like a big city.
There is a big shopping center three blocks from our house and we stop there and buy some food. With no food in the house we would starve pretty fast.
In the shopping center I feel like at home again, like in my own skin. A lot of people recognize me trying to show me their adoration. They do that fortunately only with their smiles or by asking for an autograph. I have no sharpie with me as I was used to having my whole life, so I have to buy one. Now it feels like everything is right again. This is a part of my life I probably couldn´t do without.
I miss Hamburg though, we will have to make a trip there soon, so I can show him where I used to live and where he lived with Sabine. We also should visit our parents, mom’s birthday was just recently.
„Tom, what did we give mom for her birthday this year?“ I ask curiously.
„What do you think… a handbag,“ my brother’s reply is exactly what I was expecting him to say and it makes me smile.
„Next time we should buy her something else, she already has a full closet full of them. I bought her a new sewing machine this year. In the old life, I mean,“ I finish and unfasten the seat belt as we’ve just driven in our garage. Phew, I take a deep breath after having survived the whole day. I keep feeling so strange, like I am only visiting here.
I spend the rest of the afternoon on Internet, trying to find out how much my journey through time messed up the lives of those closest to me.
Tom went down to the studio to finish something, so I have as much time as I need.
On the way home, in the car, he told me something that really surprised me. Andreas is no longer our friend. I always thought that nothing could possibly ruin our tight friendship, but I was wrong. He couldn’t stand my and Tom´s relationship. It wasn’t an option to hide it from such a close friend, he would have found out after a while anyway, so we told him. At first, everything seemed normal, he took it well, but then, slowly, step by step he stopped calling and visiting us, till he just disappeared. Tom doesn’t even know where he lives nowadays nor what he does these days.
I am sad we had lost our best friend, but I expected some bad effects. The important thing is, that he is probably alive. Maybe he even has a calmer and better life without us now. He always liked us but he considered this a betrayal. All of a sudden it was the two of us against him. He was always with us, now all of a sudden he was the third wheel. I´m not surprised that he couldn’t take it.
I transfer some money from my account to the olds man for Beda, reducing somewhat the guilty conscience I have had since I got back.
Sometimes small flashes of memory come back while I’m reading the information. Mostly they are related to the situations I was just reading about. My memory bank starts slowly filling up and hopefully in few days everything will be okay again.
It´s twilight outside, evening is slowly arriving and I better start to think what to cook with all the ingredients we bought on the way from the restaurant. Of course there’s a lot of pasta, some bread, salami… what else?
For the past few years I have been pretty alone, girlfriends passing through my life in very irregular pattern and every time they did, it was only for a short period of time. I wasn’t able to fall in love. I didn’t want to have a housewife who would poke into my life, so I had to learn at least some basic cooking. Now I should be able to cook something delicious for Tom, but what to do with no decent ingredients? I honestly didn’t think about that in the shop, I let Tom decide what to buy. I hope it will do with some traditional spaghetti dish. Tomorrow I´m going to buy something better showing Tomi what I can really do. In the end – a man’s love goes through his stomach, it´s an well-known saying.
I am finally done with the cooking and we can eat, but Tom is still stuck in the studio. I have to go down and get him otherwise the food gets cold. On the way to the cellar I can hear sounds of his guitar, but when I open the door, the power of the sound hits my ears hard. The studio is pretty well isolated so the music doesn’t escape through the walls.
I listen to the sound of Tom’s guitar and all of a sudden I feel an incredible urge to sing something. After a month spent by mourning over the loss of my brother, I´m totally starving for it. I listen for a while. Tom is sitting on a sofa, playing a well-known melody on his acoustic guitar. It´s our song. I composed it for him as a declaration of my love, but I’ve never told him.
„Du bist, alles was ich bin, und alles was durch meine Adern fliesst,“ I used to sing for him at each concert and hoped that he would get it, but that would never happen.
My brother turns his eyes to me. He has noticed me already and nods his head.
I sit next to him on the sofa and quietly start to sing the lyrics to this romantic ballad. The last tones of the song fade slowly away and I feel like crying.
Tom puts the guitar in a guitar-stand and turns to me. „Thanks, that you’ve written this for me, love, and sorry that I didn’t realize at the time,“ he whispers into the quiet studio. „I really thought that it was all about our brotherly bond, until you told me those three words for the first time… I was an idiot.“
He shifts on the sofa getting closer to me and all I can perceive is his intoxicating smell. He grabs my belt, pulls me to him and presses his lips to mine. Slowly and gently he travels with his tongue across my lower lip, then he starts to kiss me, softly, beautifully and long.
And I´m kissing him back and I finally understand why I kept the piercing in my tongue. Tom plays with it and brings me slowly closer to heaven. He interrupts his passionate kiss after a while, pulls away a little bit and whispers into my hair: „I hope I will hear those three words from you someday again…“
I smile at him. This I can make happen immediately, my love. I press him to me and whisper shakingly in his ear: „I LOVE YOU.“
In return, I get even more passionate kiss than before and I´m sure that it´s exactly what he wanted to hear. I’ve never said this to anyone. He is the first and the only one to whom I can whisper these words.
When we finally part to take a well-needed breath, I push him gently away from me because I suddenly remember why I came. „The spaghetti upstairs is surely cold now, I will have to warm them up again.“ I smile at Tom and stand up quickly to let him know that we need to go to the kitchen to eat.
„You have cooked? I’ve been sitting here starving for half an hour already and you didn’t tell me?“ He nudges my back on the way upstairs as he passes me by on the stairs to be the first one in the kitchen.
He sits down at the table and drums the cutlery against the table impatiently, like we used to when we were small and had to wait until mom would put the food on the table.
„Well, Bill honey, that´s really delicious, you couldn’t cook before, what happened?“ Tom compliments me after he has eaten half of his plate full of spaghetti.
„The life of a lonely wolf taught me that.“ I grin at him. „Sabine used to cook for you, I on the other hand had to learn how to cook myself.“
His eyes almost pop out of his head when he says with amazement in his voice: „Sabine used to cook for me? Then I would have liked to be a witness of that, now she can hardly brew a decent pot of coffee.“
I´m also amused, but I think she may not have anyone to cook for. „And how is Sabine? Does she have any boyfriend except me?“ I ask Tom with curiosity.
„No, she says she doesn’t need anyone, no man is worth destroying her life and health for, as she puts it. She is totally satisfied with her current situation,“ he says while eating.
„Has she ever had anyone?“ I ask again, fishing for more information.
„Yep, some time ago she was going out with some older man, but he was married and hurt her feelings really bad. He used to promise that he would get a divorce, but then she found out that his wife was pregnant for the third time. She ended it and from that time on she didn’t want to hear of any men. And I´m not surprised,“ completes Tom, cleans his mouth with a napkin and stands up from the table. „Thanks, bro, it was really delicious, but now I would like something sweet,“ he says, putting his empty plate on the kitchen counter, going to the freezer and taking out a box of ice cream.
„Do you feel like having one too?“ he ask and I nod. I could eat ice cream anytime. He throws at me a strawberry popsicle and slowly unwraps his own.
Tom goes to the living room and starts looking for something. I can hear a music after a while. I don´t know what song that is, but when I listen more carefully, I can hear my own voice. I look over to the living room and I can see myself on the TV.
„It´s our new video,“ says Tom and looks at me with sparkling eyes. „You look really good there, don’t you think?“ He wants to know my opinion.
I open my ice cream and sit in the armchair trying to evaluate how well we made that video. I quite like it, it´s obvious that it´s a professional´s work. It looks like we have the money for good directors. The songs sounds good the first time I listen to it, but I will have to keep listening; it always sounds differently after a while.
My eyes fall on Tom. He´s half sitting, half lying on the sofa, pleasantly lounging, feet on the table and he´s licking his strawberry ice cream contentedly. The sight of him is terribly arousing to me. He runs his tongue along the frozen sweet pink stick and I can´t take my eyes off him.
He can sense I am staring at him so he just winks at me, grins and all of a sudden bites right into it. He starts to laugh when he sees my reaction to that bite. I almost shouted: „OUCH!!!“.
