your dead best friend has left you a voicemail

Everything begins in death. A pre-coital, post-apocalyptic body shakes you to the core and begs you to tell a story that lies between a pulpit and a grave. Good morning, good evening, how do you do? Did you have a wonderful time here? How many little deaths have you suffered in the last hour (not the fun ones), can you tell? Trust me, this is not some necrophilia variation. Look. They’re pointing you to where you’re headed next. There’s the waystation. What’s this you hear? Echoes from the dead? It sounds a lot like your best friend. Remember not to turn around. 

Excuse the lapses in monographic form, but the hour is upon us! (why hour, and not this very second? either irrevocably change the world my nieces are inheriting, or disintegrate me). We’ve inhabited a fate too near the sun, so says intellect. Arctic ice breaks down, global temperature has risen. Crochet flowers have taken over the gifting market because real flowers die too soon. And yet, we still stick with things that pass away before us, like pets and mothers (in most cases).

What am I trying to say? The bus is five minutes late, and I’m counting every second. It is purgatory. Heed (who says heed in this age?) the resonant echo of a church bell or a mosque speaker. They carry flashes from a distant past- one you cannot remember and only visit like a spectator. You’re about to say goodbye to your first friend for the final time. This primal and infantile desire to crawl into the core of something and never come out comes true at the last stage. The earth will encase you in a warm womb you have craved your entire life.

Forgive our fragments. Please do not dissect our separate sounds from the one story the body must speak. Tread with ease. 

picture your best friend dead at the stake

The soil – swollen with fluid – sucks the night air dry and demands gravity to sit on my skeletal chest. My parched bones drink the blood-soaked ground, crackling as every drop breathes into every decaying atom. The skin splits and jolts back the scent of burning flesh. It is the stench of death and the sting of tears. It is a force more dead than the death I live, more hellish than the fire that burned the stake. It is the whiff of memory, crawling back on all threes. 

I shut the moonlight-subsuming lid. My bones will rest in this death until I am nothing but dust beneath the dirt. Dust does not hurt when it is trampled or burnt. It cannot be cut or drowned or torn apart like limbs. It cannot feel the weight of gravity or drink the tears of the sky. So, I will lay and wait till I am deader than bones and nails and manly hearts. 

Let the cries be damned.

Their incantations perish after this hour. 

Let sabā blow dirt into my pupil and silence the howling spirits (‘morning breeze’ does not carry the same weight).

I long, but I do not declare. 

I strain to deny the call, but I breathe the spell, “Surgite.”

Rise, the hour is here.

can you heal a corpse’s wounds?

My eye tooth is still stuck at a little corner beside your jaw; it’s too deep in, if I prise it out, my mouth will be pooled with blood. For how long would you drink your blood from our twisted tongues? We will shut our eyes when they tell us to have known better, and when I open mine, I will fulfil a prophecy and ask if you see the stars dancing on the window. A shining sun can make one hope. When God comes to choke me, your mouth will be a closing bracket; which is to say I would survive at the cost of a remembrance that will stick to my skin and bones like a serpent who can’t quite dig its teeth whole into the tail. Not yet. You cannot soften love on your own sometimes. 

The bolt of an isolated door leaves a mark better. We burn and burn and burn and we cry and cry and cry and we confess at altars the other doesn’t frequent. So when the wound’s gone, the bolt doesn’t fall. It holds and the windows hold and once again, sunshine, oracles, pores of fingers, all are let too close. I swallow all the greed right in the face of light and when the night comes, my eyes are burning. Devoid of a tale to tell the moon that night, it still yanks something ugly out of my teeth. My tears soak nothing as time watches by, hidden inside a branch on an empty road, motionless at our feet. 

A silence shared for too long makes the setting sun, the skin once again damp with remembrance feel impossible. Even when the sun rises again the next day, I do not tell you of the gaping hole inside my chest. Alone in our rooms, we sleep, burning, burning, burning, crying, crying, crying. I bury a dead insect inside my mouth. My teeth close like a bracket around it. I learn how the sun learns of beauty just for my flesh to rot before it. I still don’t let go. 

letter from your dead and best friend. 

Am I in your best journal because I am not?

Was the frequency off by some Hertz? Did I not step very kindly?

I circle the earth but the planet spins faster, much steadier than I ever could. The earth, you on it, in it. The axis around the planet… you. Am I the best [friend] because dead things make good muses? I wonder if, on this planet, there somewhere is some poetry in my name. If you ever knit a duvet that you hide inside when I am gone. You ask me if I feel the shift, the cosmic altercations (which is bullshit. I haven’t reached heaven yet, or hell).

‘Can you hear us, Major Tom?’

The engines fail to die down again, the ground control can hear me. They would pluck me back, a space oddity. Remove me from my tin, and puke on the ground. There would I be… en route to a lengthy expiry. But long before that happens, before your dead becomes undead, and your best just beautiful, I wish I could sit in my space hive, and tell them how I have been. And how I have been kind. How I own some of the planet you so rightfully claim. The microphone is come alive again, and I have never abhorred and anticipated a voice – a noise – before. Are you there? Calling for me. I wouldn’t come back if you did, but did you? ‘Can you hear us, Major Tom?’I think of pouring myself a hot drink and breaking a window with my flask. ‘Major Tom can hear you [for now]. Ground Control, do you like [sob] stories?’ I confess that kindness is not my nature before I inscribe my tale on every stone that you turn over.

Your friend-

Best when dead.

sound and fury at the end of the world

It’s the year you exorcise them. The death of an idea is the death of a friend. Tunnel vision where the corrosion of a slow-killing poison lies dormant in the dark until it’s too late. When an idea dies, a part of you dies with it. A part that naively believed that by clinging onto that reality you might’ve kept your sanity a little longer. A semblance of normalcy that you cultivated by turning your eyes away from the rot festering inside your bone marrow.  A catatonic shift occurs where you’re left standing on a train watching the world pass by and cursing it as it goes.

a dead friend is not a moral beacon 

You were never on that train and inadvertently became a part of the cursed. Follow the stench of death to the crowd gathered to witness the procession. Hear the dying, the dead, the death question you. The friend is gone forever, and yet the death of the idea gives birth to another. Pry yourself open. Who are you without the idea, without the friend? Hollow bones. A rotting carcass. You know nothing if you don’t know them. Not even yourself. You use crutches to measure your self-worth and look in the eyes of another to see yourself but now the mirror lies broken, distorting the image. The mirror figure looks nothing like you. A decade passes looking for that answer. 

going back to the street where you left me

The answer arrives sitting by a wall closer to home. Turn down a familiar street, and the sounds of the procession from years ago fade, replaced by the rush of waves, shouted insults, and a basketball thudding against the court. Smiling at you, waiting for you, the mirror appears to be whole once more. The mirage does not hold. You cut your hand on the jagged edges of glass and blood flows. The fragments bite into your skin: you refuse to let go. The flowing blood becomes your friend until you’re beckoned by that voice again. Every image is distorted inside the house.

pick up your phone, idiot

You are not who you are, they are not who they were, and yet it hurts just the same. Perhaps the idea never died, it lives in you now and you must give it a place to rest with the vessel that held it so dear once. You’ve never lost but that one friend, you’ve never won but that one idea. And they both die with you on a night much like that night where you find them, The Mirror, The Idea, The Friend. Smiling at you, waiting for you. One last time.

an altar where we forgive each other

Imagine a sky where blues and pinks collide and take you back to the swing set where we first met. The damp roads, the trees, and the streetlight still shine orange embers despite the early morning light. Dew drops glistening on white rose petals usher breath back into my windpipe. No dense slime obstructs passageways where our molecules meet.

Yellowing teeth glint against the light at the end of the tunnel. We run after the epoch, the melody that beckons us. We chase after the symphony to cage it behind our heartstrings. As soon as we lay our hands on it, the air changes into a murky grey. The trees, the flowers and the souls – all bleed out their colours and turn into a static black. Do not doze off now. The dream stretches out its hands to us. We wake up in a new tunnel, called back to the void. So, we sit and pass around tea in cups unseen, waiting for our air and the treacherous, fleeting sense of joy to return, waiting to see the treacherous, fleeting life, its hands and lips and breath again. 

They’re not dead, they’re just away. A broken city is warped in a heavy blanket of voices that must come from beyond the rubble. So when they call, of course, you look back.