* This chapter is told from the point of view of two characters, Jack, the protagonist, and Taylor, whose writer is not me and to whom I owe this story. So I want to highlight this important fact. There will be more than one chapter of this style (the vast majority), so I hope you like it. I would say it is "theater type".

Thank you my friend. All credits to you for Taylor's parts and for being inspiration for Jack's story. *

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When you're friends with someone, anger and rancor end up in the background. In the same way that Pat and I just as fast as we argue, we forgive each other, we forgive each other. Quick, laughing and with a brief friendly hug. I am in Hyde Park with him and Finn, in the shade, on one of the benches, laughing at our usual battles. But, laughter, like crying, is removed as soon as it appears.

And my laugh ends with a voice. A voice that is neither Finn's nor Pat's. A voice that I haven't heard in months. And the last thing that voice said to me was asked in almost a whisper. Right now it is as if everything went back to that day. When I look at him, even though I know I am going to find my best friend, I feel myself going back in time to our last day together... And yet he dares to say «hello» to me. I don't even know what to say. I stopped him from entering my house., I asked him to forget about me, I did not answer his WhatsApp, but he has returned.

"What do you want?"

Taylor: I witness how your laughter leaves your lips. I put so many times for so many years, a laugh in them, that I will never be able to understand how such an innocent confession could have made your laughter dissapear. I swallow and feel my eyes fill with tears when I hear your question, but I still smile, because the only thing I want is to fix things with you, that you forgive me even though I haven't done anything to you, and to be back to how we were yesterday, to be able to be the same tomorrow. I take my hands out of my jeans pockets and swallow hard again.

"Talk to you..." I say wishing you accept.

I look at Finn, one of your best friends, and although I think I can see him laughing, I don't say anything, and I look at you again.

Jack: I can see that you swallow hard, looking at me thinking something that I don't know while your eyes fill with tears. I remember his «I'm in love with you, Jack», that made me laugh a lot. I couldn't believe it. But I also remember how I felt. And, having you in front of me, just brings it all back to me.

And you smile. I don't know how you can smile... You tell me you want to talk to me and I laugh lightly letting the air go out of my nose.

"You and I have nothing to talk about." I reply raising my hands.

My friends are quiet, but I hear Patrick's laugh and Finn follows him.

Taylor: I wait for your response, but it hurts me so much. I see how you laugh slightly, and how after you make that gesture with your hands, your friends laugh too. Their laughter makes me suspect that they know that happened between us, because they have not spoken to me, and I know them too.

I close my eyes for a moment feeling very ashamed, but I try to stay calm and not to cry, although when I open my eyes again, I feel that they are even more full of tears.

"But you are my best friend..." I say that wanting tell you how can we not have anything to talk... thinking that perhaps this truth of mine will move you and change your mind.

Jack: Sometimes not laughing in front of friends who start to laugh ends up looking bad. The least I want is for my friends to think that I'm as fag as you are. However, I have no desire to laugh.

I see you close your eyes and take that brief moment to look at my friends, who seem to be enjoying themselves. But you look at me again, with your eyes full of tears, more if possible, and it seems to me that you will burst into tears if nobody remedies it. And it won't be me.

What you say, that excuse you give as if everything should be arranged for being my best friend, ends up being the only thing I need to settle what I thought has been closed since May.

"Me?" I ask, pointing to myself, not moving from the back of the bench I'm sitting on.

I listen to my friends make fun of you, imitating your way of speaking and the words you say.

"Not anymore." I deny.

You are no longer my best friend. And that, when spoken out loud, seems definitive. I have never believed it so much before. Not even when I asked you to forget everything.

Taylor: I hear the laughter of your friends, the way they imitate me, and they appear to put on a strange posture whilst doing it...

I feel totally broken, totally frustrated, and today more than ever I wish not to be like I am, but to be like the others.

I listen to the question you ask while pointing to yourself, and that «Not anymore» that follows it. Two words that act as strongly in my heart as an «I love you», although in a very different way... This hurts much more.

I bite my tongue to keep from crying, after swallowing hard.

"Okay..." I say and back up a couple of steps, hoping you will hold me back, but I just turn around, closing my eyes and feeling tears rolling down my cheeks when I start walking.

Jack: I can't laugh. I am not able to laugh in front of you. My friends do not stop imitating you, putting on effeminate postures, making noises. Instead, you keep looking at me. It is as if they did not exist, nor this park, nor this bank, nor the night almost arriving. There is only me and what you feel for me.

I am not able to imagine what you are thinking. I can only hear an «okay» before you take a few steps back as I look at you wondering how it is possible that, after so many years of friendship, you are left in nothing just because you took it all in one fell swoop. But, when you turn around, my friends start to whistle, making a high-pitched «uh» and laugh. Then I look at them and end up laughing. I cannot stay silent in front of them in case they think that he affected me.

But the worst comes when I hear them say «fag», «babe», «don't want fags here». Things that do nothing but speed up my pulse while trying to look like them, who already look at me because they see me quiet.

Everything happens very fast sometimes even if we don't realize it. So fast, it's like we don't live time the same way. I don't know what Taylor is feeling as he walks away. But I do know how I feel. Something that does not compare to anything I've ever felt as I see those guys I had not notived approaching.

I get up from the bench I'm sitting on, almost jumping. My heart is racing, it hits my temples. My pulse trembles. When I see that stranger give Taylor that punch, I almost feel it inside me. My friends have stopped laughing and I feel them standing up when I do. I am unable to look away from Taylor when they give him that blow that leaves him lying on the ground. I feel so incapable that I don't hear anything around me but their voices, the noise of his body being hit.

"Let's get out of here, man ..." I hear him say to Finn.

After that, I feel him tug on my arm. I don't know what is happening around me, because I feel lying there on that floor, taking those blows. I notice that they pull me and I pull away from that hand and I start walking at a fast pace because I want to run away, I want to escape, I want to feel out of this day that shouldn't have existed. And then I run.

Hyde Park has seen me laugh with Taylor, play with Taylor, grow up with Taylor... Now he sees me run away from Taylor because he is on the ground and it is my fault. And I can't help but remember I raised him by the hand in the past when he was on the floor after playing. But not now.

I hear a voice shout that it's going to call the police, while I run as if they were chasing me, as if it was me who committed that crime. And it was me.

I wonder what happened, how will Taylor be, if he will be one of the victims who die from beatings because of their sexual orientation. Then I get to my convertible, parked on the road. My hand is shaking when I put the key in and get into my car. I feel like a murderer who has to run away from the crime scene.

But, when I realize I'm crying, I know it's not because I look like a running killer, it's because of Taylor.

I start my convertible to leave there. I am not able to cry as I want ... I am not even able to cry anymore. I'm a coward who doesn't dare even that. I am a miserable person who just let them turn their friend into a piece of meat to kick. I am someone despicable. And even now I cannot console myself with my own thoughts.

I can barely breathe because I can't cry. The air that is hitting me, coming from the road in which I'm driving with my convertible, doesn't even seem to help me. I feel something inside me that breaks me, but it doesn't hurt. It is as if I had taken that beating, as if they had also given me all those blows, all those words that resounded in Hyde Park, that keeps the echoes of our best laughters.

The image of my best friend on the floor does not leave my head at any time. But neither do our games go away, those we played in my house in the afternoons, in my house, the nights sleeping in the same room. I wonder how long ago my best friend fell in love with me, when it all started, how long he had been quiet... What hurts me the most is that, because of me, maybe Taylor is now on the way to the hospital. And I don't know where to go. My hands tremble on the steering wheel of the car. I don't want to go to my house.

I keep driving on the highway, thinking about nothing, watching the traffic lights, the lights, the cars go by... If I had wanted to go to my house, I would have arrived a while ago because Hyde Park is next door. But I don't even know what to do. I should be next to Taylor. I should have taken him to the hospital, reported to the police that two guys beat him up.

I should be by his side. And yet I have stayed as far away from him as I can. I asked him to do the same, I left his messages on read, and even pretended not to see him when crossing the street, I have run away.

But we cannot run away from what is ours. And Taylor Hayes is my best friend.

It's when I recognize that fact about Taylor, that I feel the tears begin to flow down my cheeks more easily. He is my best friend. Not was. Is. I can't fool myself by saying he isn't, that there is nothing left of what there was simply because a different feeling separates the two of us.

I hate myself for getting this far... I never thought I would get this far. And yet I have ceased to be myself since he ceased to be who he had been to me. When I saw him walk through my kitchen door that day. It just left a deep void inside of me. Although, surely for him, he only left an empty glass of juice, an empty chair, an empty house...

Surely I became the first person to call him «fagot». Surely I became the first person to disappoint him. Surely I became the first person to break him into a thousand pieces. Me, his first friend. His best friend. His brother without sharing blood. His first love.

I don't know which part of life is responsible for confusing hearts and feelings. I have not yet been able to decipher what is the system of this life that is not at all like the digital codes of a damn computer operating system.

I wish everything was as simple as creating a prototype in robotics or coming up with the perfect creation of next-generation software. I wish we didn't break a heart as easily as a glass breaks.

I feel a vibration against my leg, in my pants pocket, and then the chorus of my favorite song. Someone is calling me on the phone and I don't care about anything. I just care about following the road nowhere. And nowhere ends up being the Tower Bridge, over the Thames.

I would not be aware that I am crying if the air hadn't been making me feel my tears on my cheeks.

My convertible drives in the lane where there are other cars that I do not know where they will go, but they are ahead of me. I think everyone in this life ends up going ahead of me.

My friends, they are not like Tay. He is a friend, someone with whom I have shared everything, leaving me nothing. I think I've shared so much that he took half a life with him. Although I did not want to answer those messages and read him, even if I told him to forget everything, part of me said no. And I kept waiting for him every day at the university.

My friends asked me if I knew anything about him, and I always avoided the topic until, one day, I told them what had happened. And I did it the worst way I could have: laughing, joking, mocking.

I have been the one who has brought everything here. I started. I fed the laughter, the teasing, the jokes. And I'm done with giving Taylor those punches without giving it to him.

Right now he may be dying... Or possibly, dead already. And I'm driving in my damn car looking for an exit that doesn't exist.

I have left my best friend abandoned to his fate and I am still breathing. Life, as always, plays in a dirty and cruel way.

My mobile continues to ring. A new call, another one that I won't pick up. I don't want to know anything about the world. I want everyone to forget about me because I've never really been better than when we were together. He wanted to spend time with me, in my house, in my car, in the park, at university. My friends don't even stop by my house for more than five minutes to pick them up to take tham somewhere. My only and best friend, always and forever, was, is, and will continue to be Tay.

I feel nauseous. The very idea of ​​thinking that my friend will be in the news tomorrow, that Twitter will have a hashtage where people will leave their comment of condolences or their taunts about being gay, I could see he on TV as another victim of radical violence, it make me feel terrible.

I do not want to answer any calls for fear of being told that they have killed him. In the end, my journey on the road is unbearable and I end up getting out of the car, feeling dizzy whilst experiencing stomach pain and an uncontrollable urge to vomit. Something I ended up doing, sadly all down the side of a building. I'm thankful for it though, as it stopped me falling to the ground.

I am alone ... And I am afraid. So scared that I cry with grief. No one would be of any use to me now. Alone, if I could turn back, I would feel good. No turning back in the car, to go back to Hyde Park and rescue Tay ... turn back in time, to go back to the moment when I told him to leave my life forever.

How many lives do we break throughout our lives? Perhaps, for all of those broken lifes in our care, we arrive broken at the end of ours.

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Corrections by _AlbaEscritora_and Rachaellouise99

Thank you so much, girls!