The past curled up like a yellow, wrinkled autumn leaf and fell in my dry, lonely lap. The sun shone behind broken bar clouds and reminded me of a future yet to come. I sat erect in the middle of time on a green park bench where we had lived and laughed together. But by now you had left, gone far beyond my reach. I had dreamt of a time without you, of a cliff beyond which you walked on clear, into thin mountain air. I was rooted on rock and broken stone, the silt between my toes. I had felt the solidity of earth, even in the dream, I felt as though my feet were grounded, while yours were free of land and life. You were lucky, you had escaped, but left me behind to deal with the mess your absence spawned. The endless hours of despair, the endless trips to your apartment to see if you had returned to live again. To see if death had been just a festival of life, to see if normalcy returned of grevious drinking.
The leaves were begining to fall again, it had been four years since that night, when we drew a line of death between you and me. We were on either side now, you more alive than me. In the beginning I couldn't remember your face even though we had lived all our life together. But now I remembered every detail, every line that drew your face out. I wished I looked like you, so that the mirror would show you to me, instead of my own dreaded reflection. I wished for a time that wasn't so devoid of you. I saw you sometimes, sitting, or walking around the orchard of blooming wishes, plucking the loveliest flower. How I hated you for leaving, for walking on in thin air, for being so magical and so dead. I still saw that mark on the side of your white forehead, that one mark that you died of, like a bullet wound that went through and through and didn't spill precious blood. I was amazed when I saw you dead, how clean and calm you looked, as though sleep had usurped you and
you were smiling at the idea. I looked at the patterns that the leaves made on your body, swaying in the January wind and watched little tufts of your hair catch the fading light of the west. That is where you went as I watched your footprints disappear in the mud. I don't think you knew I was watching. I watched everything, I carried your head in my lap on my way to save your life. You slept on peacefully, unaware of your life slipping away into the darkness outside the car window. I felt like you were stealing my heart away, clawing at it in your desperation to escape. I wanted to stop you, to tell you that it hurt to watch your own heart bleed. You carried on anyway. The smooth stone of the hospital had no comfort to offer, neither did our parents. They would never know you the way I did, dead, slipping between life and death, sleeping on while I slowly lost my mind. In a while I knew better than anyone that you were dead. I didn't feel the warmth of a human head on my lap. I could feel your head hours later, on my now vacant lap, I felt the warmth again and I watched you die again. Do you know, that I had another dream when you left, of you leaning against the hostel room balcony, smoking against a wild, wild storm. All I saw was your silhouette and the smoke from your pursed lips. I reached out to take the cigarette from you and you walked away, turned the corner. When I got to that corner, I found nothing beyond it, just a lousy yellow wall. And yet you had carried on before all of us, just the way you died. I would stay awake all night, afraid of that dream, if it should happen to return and soak me in the fear of losing you over and over again. Now loss is an old friend whom I call upon for comfort for loss is the only way I can still hold on to you.
Your rooms were washed clean of your signs. Unlike other things we lose, that we think about repeatedly, everyone tried to forget you too quickly and only remembered you more fiercely. I came away because I wanted to mourn your death alone, in empty corners and long walks. When trees began to regain their colours, I walked to your flat to grieve amongst things you had lived in. I lay for hours in your unmade bed, thinking about you, about how cold, foggy January nights were never happy occasions for us again. How your death had been a festival of grief, how hundreds had poured in to help us mourn. Mourn a loss that they possibly could not understand. No one had held your dying frame, or felt the last of your life ebb away through the tiny,bloodless hole. Suddenly I wanted your life and live it through for you. Your life would be lived out better, happier than mine.You should have lived instead of me, I should've been the one to have been killed by tiny bloodless holes. I did think of following you, over a cliff and beyond walls but I always held back thinking what if you really did not want me there, there where you were, beyond life and loss. I could still see you looking over my shoulder when I read the last letter you wrote me, about your new bank job and Krishna, the girl you were going to marry. You had our father's eyes and our mother's beautiful face, you were perfect. There were never any marks of that inherited lineage on me. You took away the last familiar face, the face I recognised as my own. When one day, your old friend called to ask for you, I was made to say again, how you couldn't come to the phone, you were so inaccessible, so dead. They never knew how that bloodless hole had taken your life away. They thought you had a full life, a long healthy fifty year old life, filled with the essentials of wife and family and job and relations. It was strange to think how you may have had that life, and how I may have remembered you differently. You would've been defined by a presence, instead of the perpetual absence. But maybe alive, I would never have been able to absorb you the way I did when you died. Maybe, we would've been ordinary members of a family, joined by the compulsion of blood ties.
There is no compulsion any more, just love. And memory.
