Seven years later.

The sun was beautiful as it was filtered through the crowns of the pine trees.

I was surrounded by the pines, and birds. Completely and utterly surrounded by them. Sometimes, I heard the rustling of leaves, and instead of turning my head to try and figure out where the sound came from, I would close my eyes, try to imagine what kind of animal it was. Another bird? A snake? A squirrel? If I focussed, I could hear the complete absence of cars, the absence as strong a sound as the presence of it would be, perhaps even stronger. This far out on the countryside, there was no traffic.

It cleansed my heart.

All parts of if it except the deepest ones that nothing could reach, because they housed my most precious memories, the most precious parts of my life.

I came here most weekends and took a long walk in the forest. For two hours, I would just walk, cleaning my mind, straining my muscles with the ups and downs of the paths. Sometimes, I would walk along the main path, sometimes smaller ones that went over roots and stones. If I passed something beautiful, like a stream or a bed of flowers, I would not take out my phone to take a picture but sit down for a while and breathe. In the end, I would always snack on something, go back to my car, and drive home.

I passed the big playground where some children played, closely watched over by their parents. I felt a pang in my heart then, a pang of longing. I still made myself smile, as if trying not to offend an invisible someone by displaying distraught as I saw children.

As I walked out of the forest and out onto the fields of the countryside, towards the small parking lot where I had parked my Tesla, earned by years in the IT industry, I found my smiled turned genuine as I turned my face towards the sun. I got into the driver's seat, let my car purr away while listening to silence as music saddened me nowadays.

I drove for an hour before I came home.

But the forest, with its high pine trees and birds, was still in my heart as I went to my bathroom and showered, doing my weekly  wash of my hair, so long now it reached my waist.

I swallowed my pills and went to bed.

Life was okay. 

I was torn.

You know those people who had everything? Literally everything? Money. Looks. A loving partner. The family of their dreams. The home of their dreams. Yet they would complain about feeling depressed.

On one hand, they angered me. How could anyone who had everything I had ever dreamed of be so unhappy? It was so frightfully unfair.

But on the other hand, one part of me believed that of course, they should be allowed to be depressed just as anyone.

Because I had everything someone else had ever dreamed of. A job. A career. An apartment that I owned. My health. My friends. Some people had none of that.

Yet, I was depressed. Not just depressed, the feeling, but an actual label. Look, everyone! A person with actual depression! He's not just depressed, he has depression!

I tried to give myself some space from those thoughts about not having a reason to be depressed because I had so much, telling myself that with that logic, only the unluckiest person on earth would be allowed to be sad or there would always be someone who had it worse than you, but it was impossible. The thoughts were incredibly intrusive.

My friends from university, some of which lived out of town or even abroad, didn't know. I'd attended their weddings. Had had dinners with them. Wild party nights. Travelled. But none of them knew about my depression.

Nor did they know the reason behind it.

They would ask me why I didn't date. They once even sat me down, all eight of them, which caused me to almost freak out, but then they said they all knew I was gay, that I could stop hiding my partner. They almost didn't believe me when I said I wasn't ashamed of my sexual orientation, nor did I try to hide a male partner; I just genuinely didn't have one. Then, they would try to match me with different people. Take me to parties where they'd invited their gay or bi or pan friends. Seated me next to gay cousins on weddings. I'd gained two or three friends that way, but nothing more.

I just seemed incapable of falling in love with anyone else.

It was a relief, in a way, to know I could manage alone. I had been afraid that I would go directly to the next, but I didn't. Maybe, the fear of it itself was what kept me from it. Which, of course, made me afraid to let go of the fear.

So I took antidepressants. Anxiolytics. Sleeping pills.

Sertraline. Alimemazine. Melatonin.

I knew my friends meant well. I knew it, and I still loved them.

But they didn't know.

They didn't know about me and him.

I hadn't even told my psychiatrist exactly what had happened because, honestly, who would believe it? But she knew I had flashbacks, and nightmares, and avoided places, which she had deemed to be enough to diagnose me with post-traumatic stress as if depression wasn't enough. Diagnosing something didn't help the diagnosis, thought; treatment did.

And I seemed to be untreatable.

So that night, as most night, a few hours after I had gone to bed, I woke up with a jerk, sitting up, panting. My entire body was drenched in a cold sweat, making me feel hot and cold at the same time which was incredibly unpleasant. One would expect that waking up was a relief, because that was when you realised it had only been a dream, that you were safe now. But for me, waking up was much, much worse than the dreams.

Because when I woke up, I would realise that everything I had dreamed was true.

And he wasn't there.

I started crying then, a heart-wrenching sound that frightened me, that sort of crying that could only be stopped by someone coming to hold you, stroking your back, kissing the top of your head, telling you everything was going to be okay before curling up in your bed with you so that you could go to sleep together.

But I had lost that someone.

t still looked kind of the same.

I believed most people would say it looked exactly the same, not just kind of, but they wouldn't notice the change of details the way I did. A few small bushes that had started to grow on the ground. A couple of new buildings far away on the skyline. Minor changes, but for me, they were huge.

Because his eyes had never seen them when we stood on top of our hill together.

I had avoided the place for so long. I had been so frightened of the top of the hill that I had even avoided thinking about it. It was my psychiatrist that had asked me if there was one place, any place, that I thought I could manage to go to of all the places I avoided.

I had sighed and suggested the hardest place to visit of all, without telling her it was.

I had begun by taking the bus to the bus stop, stood there for a while, then crossed the rode and taken the bus home. The next time, I had done the same thing, only this time, I had walked to the very base of the hill, where I had suffered a silent panic attack, and waited for it to blow over in the way my psychiatrist had suggested. The next time, I walked two steps up the hill. Another panic attack. The next time, five steps. Ten steps. After one month, I was all the way up.

I had never felt so lonely yet so close to someone in my entire life.

Now, going to our meeting spot still filled me with a sense of emptiness, yet I did it every week. He had never had any form of funeral. There were only three people who knew him properly; me, Madara and Hashirama, and one of us was dead. Tobirama hadn't even been a person with a social security number or a medical record. He had just appeared into this world, unnoticed, and then disappeared, equally unnoticed.

So I had made a place for where I could remember him, talk a little. It was at the top of our hill. I had planted a little tree there, exactly where he used to sit. I would sit down, just like I had done with him when he was alive, thinking, or talking. Wondering things. What his favourite season would have been, had he ever had the chance to experience them all. Whether him and my brother would have become friends. Whether or not he would have come up with that cancer cure.

I sighed, hugged my knees while looking out at the view, the tree next to me. It was strange, that two people who had been the closest to me were both gone. Hashirama had just disappeared after everything happened. He was sought for by the police, but they never found him. Then, last year, by accident as I was looking though Mongolian news as one of my clients were from a Mongolian tech company and I wanted to be able to have something to small-talk about, I came over a news article stating that a professor from my country had died in an explosion in a Mongolian lab. The explosion was believed to be an accident due to the lack of security measurements.

And in that article was a picture of him, and he was even named leaving no doubt it was actually professor Hashirama Senju and not his look-alike.

I expected for emotions to wash over me. Any emotions. Sadness. Glee. Anger. Relief. But there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. I felt completely detached from the man in the Mongolian newspaper. I had moved on with my life.

At least from him.

I sighed, looked over at the little tree next to me.

"Won't it be sad?" I asked. "That in three hundred years, you will stand here, strong and sturdy, while I will be gone? Dead? Forgotten about?"

I played with the thought that someone would come plant a tree for me on this exact spot so that we would keep growing next to each other, representing the way we could have grown together in life but never had the possibility to do, until we both stood tall and steady, representing how grounded you deserved to feel after a long life lined with the hardships that came with it. A lone tear fell down my cheek, ended up on the ground, watering the roots of his tree, making him grow like my laughter should have done in life.

"I wish you were here", I whispered.

I hid my face in my hands and I cried silently.

I went home and took my pills before going to bed.

Life was okay.