Chapter Text
Chi-Chi
If I close my eyes and concentrate enough, I can still smell the scent of that period.
It's not a vague memory, it's a physical presence pressing against my lungs.
It smelled of freshly baked apple pie, with that sweetish hint of cinnamon that saturated the kitchen air, and of fresh laundry detergent, a scent of clean and sun-dried cotton that, in my child's mind, was synonymous with security and eternal happiness.
My childhood was not simply happy; It was a work of art finished down to the smallest detail, a bubble of blown glass in which the morning light seemed never to go out.
But perfection, as I would learn the hard way years later, is a fragile and deeply deceptive substance.
It is a precarious balance that does not allow for cracks.
And my bubble was destined to burst, not with a roar, but with a dry sound, leaving me with only the sharp, painful fragments of what had once been my entire universe.
Our home was a living organism, a heart that beat in unison with our steps.
It was a chorus of voices that intertwined without ever overlapping in an unpleasant way, a domestic symphony made up of doors that opened with a familiar creak and footsteps that ran up and down the wooden stairs, producing a rhythm that I knew by heart.
I remember breakfasts: moments of benevolent chaos full of joy.
The oak table was our center of gravity.
There, morning chatter and childish jokes mingled with the crystalline tinkling of cutlery against the ceramic and the robust scent of coffee my father sipped while reading the newspaper.
I remember lunches in the garden, when summer seemed like an endless season destined to never die.
We sat under the refreshing shade of the large trees, where the rustling of the leaves was the background to our laughter that was lost in the wind.
The adults' speeches seemed like warm currents in which we children swam without fear, convinced that that heat would protect us forever.
And then the dinners, wrapped in the warmth of the fireplace during the winter, when the crackling fire cast reassuring shadows on the walls and we lost ourselves in dreams for a future that appeared as a bright expanse without obstacles.
But in that symphony of affections, the most beautiful melody, the most harmonious and pure chord, was the one I played with Vegeta.
To simply call ourselves "twins" would be reductive, almost an insult to the nature of our bond.
We weren't just two siblings born on the same day; we were two halves of the same soul that fate had decided to separate into two distinct bodies, two sides of the same coin that could look at the world only if united.
We shared everything, without reservations and without selfishness.
From the most mundane games to the most intimate secrets we whispered under the covers in the middle of the night, from the deepest fears —such as the fear of the dark or storms— to the greatest hopes we projected towards the stars.
We were inseparable, a unique and indissoluble entity that defied the laws of physics.
If I scraped my knee, it was as if the pain was throbbing in his leg as well.
If he laughed at a funny idea, joy exploded in my chest before I even opened my mouth.
We were united by an invisible bond but stronger than any material known to man.
Our day began together and ended together, in a perfect circle.
We woke up at dawn, when the outside world was still shrouded in milky silence and the first sunlight was just beginning to color the sky with pinkish and lilac shades.
We chased each other through the long corridors of the house, barefoot, feeling the coolness of the floor under the soles of our feet, and our laughter resounded in the still air.
We spent hours in the back garden, a magical kingdom where every bush was a jungle and every stone a mountain to climb.
We invented epic stories and endless adventures, building sand castles that were impregnable fortresses for us and dreaming aloud.
In the evening, exhausted but happy, we lie down in our beds next to each other.
Before sleep took us away, we shook hands or hugged each other, and exchanged that promise that for us was a dogma, a universal law
"We will never separate. We will always stay together, no matter what"
We believed that promise with every fiber of our being.
We were children, and for children, promises have the weight of absolute truth.
We believed that no force in the world, neither human nor divine, could break our bond.
We felt invincible, protected by the warm shell of our love for each other and the strength of our union.
Nothing could go wrong, because evil was something that happened to others, in books or in distant stories.
The world was a carpet spread at our feet, and we were ready to conquer it, hand in hand.
But life is not a children's story, and its cruelty can be ruthlessly unpredictable.
The first sign that something was breaking didn't come as a hurricane, but as an icy whisper.
It was a subtle change, almost imperceptible at first, like a discordant note that timidly creeps into a perfect symphony.
The atmosphere inside the house, once vibrant with light, began to become heavy.
Laughter, which had previously been the background noise of our days, suddenly became rare, almost forced.
Our parents' voices, which I remembered as warm and reassuring, turned into whispers filled with an electric tension.
They would stop abruptly as soon as Vegeta or I entered the room, replaced by tight smiles and glances that avoided ours.
I didn't understand.
I was a child, I couldn't decipher the complexity of adult feelings, I couldn't understand how love could turn into resentment, or how that could erode the foundations of a marriage.
But I could feel the anxiety that hovered between the walls, an invisible poison that made the air difficult to breathe.
That tension terrified me.
In that period of growing uncertainty, Vegeta became my only compass.
As the outside world became alien and threatening, he was my only constant.
We were getting even closer to each other, becoming almost symbiotic.
We kept each other company during those deafening silences that filled meal hours.
We held hands under the table.
During our parents' quarrels, which exploded behind closed doors like distant thunder, we took refuge in our secret corner and told each other fantastic stories, turning up the volume of our imagination to cover the screams that came from the other side of the wall.
He was my rock, my anchor in a sea that I no longer recognized.
With him next to me, I could still delude myself that everything would be resolved.
Then, the day came when the illusion was shattered definitively.
The horror materialized on a gray afternoon that seemed to presage catastrophe.
Our parents called us into the living room.
I remember the rigidity of their bodies, the physical distance they had put between each other on the couch.
With broken voices, they announced that they were separating.
Their words fell into the silence of the room like hammer blows on a thin crystal.
Divorce. Separation. Different houses.
They were technical, cold terms, which made no sense in my vocabulary as a child.
I knew for sure that my life as I had known it had ended at that precise moment.
The ground beneath my feet was no longer just giving way; it had disappeared completely, leaving me to fall into the void.
But the worst news was yet to come.
Not only was our family being destroyed, but also the two of us, the only thing left intact, had to be dismembered.
For bureaucratic reasons, for agreements made over our heads, or perhaps for a sick sense of justice that provided for "one each", they decided to divide us.
Our mother would take Vegeta and go live far away.
I would stay there, in that house that was becoming a museum of painful memories, with my father, Gyumao.
Why?
The question was pounding my brain.
Why did we have to be divided as if we were objects to be shared? Didn't they understand that we were one thing?
The questions crowded into my head, but the tears stifled them all.
The moment of physical separation was a trauma that left scars that still bleed today.
It's a memory that my mind has tried to bury, but that resurfaces every time I hear the sound of an engine moving away.
I remember Vegeta's face.
His usual proud and rebellious expression had vanished, replaced by confusion.
His eyes, usually so vibrant and filled with a light of defiance towards life, had become opaque, veiled by a sadness that no child should ever know.
He held me in a hug that I still feel on my skin.
It seemed that he wanted to fuse our molecules, that he wanted to anchor himself to me to avoid being swept away by the current.
My words were interrupted by sobs that shook my whole body.
"Don't leave, Vegeta...please don't leave me alone. We promised...we had always said together..."
But my pleas had no power against the will of adults.
I was detached from him almost by force.
The car door closed with a dull sound that sounded like the tolling of a bell.
The engine started, the wheels began to spin on the gravel of the driveway, and I stood there, motionless, watching my brother's silhouette get smaller and smaller behind the rear window, until it became a dark spot and then vanished completely around the curve.
At that moment, a part of my soul was extinguished.
Life after that day became a waking nightmare, a sequence of gray and meaningless days.
The house, once the beating heart of our world, was transformed into a silent and cold mausoleum.
Silence was not peace; It was a heavy absence, a white noise that made my ears ring.
My father tried to be there, but he was a broken man.
Although physically present, his mind was elsewhere, lost in the labyrinth of his personal failure and pain.
He wandered through the rooms like a ghost, unable to find the words to console me because he had none to console himself.
I began to feel like an incomplete entity.
I looked myself in the mirror and I couldn't see Chi-Chi; I could only see half of a whole that had been broken.
I felt alone in the midst of people, lost.
And then, when I thought I had hit rock bottom, fate decided to dig again.
The news of the accident arrived.
A bolt from the blue that incinerated what little was left of my hope.
During a trip, the car in which our mother and Vegeta were traveling had gone off the road.
My mother had died instantly.
There were no certain traces of Vegeta, except for the fact that he had disappeared at the site of the disaster, among metal sheets and rivers in flood, and he was soon declared dead by the authorities.
That moment was the final collapse.
I couldn't process the news.
Denial became my only shield.
How could they have disappeared? How could Vegeta's light have gone out like this, in a banal instant of twisted metal and wet asphalt?
Shock paralyzed me.
I didn't cry anymore, I didn't speak.
My father collapsed definitively, becoming a shadow of himself, while I closed myself off.
The house became even quieter, if possible.
Many years have passed since then.
Time, which poets say is the healer of all evil, for me has only been an accomplice of forgetfulness and erosion.
The wounds have not healed; they are just covered with a thick and ugly crust that pulsates with each change of season.
Grief has become a silent roommate.
The memories of my perfect childhood have become faded photographs, overexposed images where faces begin to lose their contours.
Vegeta has become a ghost that inhabits the corridors of my mind, a shadow that whispers in my ear in dreams and that observes me from the bottom of the mirrors.
Today I find myself contemplating the ruins of what had been a luminous life.
I realize that the Chi-Chi of "before" died in that gravel driveway, or perhaps between the metal sheets of that car.
What is left is a reduced version, a fragment that desperately tries to make sense of a void that has no meaning.
I learned that sometimes you don't just lose one person; You lose context, you lose your identity, you lose the ability to believe that the world is a safe place.
My heart is a house with closed shutters, where the only melody is the ticking of a clock that marks a motionless time.
My mind is a labyrinth where every road leads to an unanswered question: Why?
Often, when the silence of the house becomes too oppressive, I go to the cliff.
I look at the immensity of the ocean, that blue expanse that seems to have no end, and I think of the unbridgeable distance that separates me from him.
The sea reminds me that he is no longer there, that he has been swallowed up by something much bigger than us.
I look at the sky and look for a sign, a miracle, a crack in reality that will give him back to me.
But the sky remains silent, a blue indifferent to my pleas.
I stay there, breathing in the smell of salt, waiting for something I know deep down that will never happen.
Because Vegeta is gone, taking with him the key to my world, and leaving me here to watch over what remains of a fire that has never completely been extinguished.