Linger

I’m still here. It’s been too long. When I lift my arm, it shakes. Something feels strange. Last week—I was here too—when I heard voices—

Here I am. The rug is against my cheeks, smelling of something sour. The soft, underlying texture, encrusted with a layer of something tainted. One, two, three. When I stand up, everything seems so far away. Numerous tangent lines, jutting out from the ends of furniture pieces and streaks of light.

The ceiling above is gone—right now it is night, but the sky looks reddish, rusty. I’d been talking to someone on the phone for a while, having lost track of time, and when I hung up I felt immensely tired, and awful, each breath holding the weight of the rest of my life.

Listen closely. There are voices behind the walls. Any wall. It inches closer to you when you look. Don’t look. Just listen. Feel the whispers of lost sentences crawl up your spine. Keep your eyes fixed on something on the floor, or else the walls will close in on you. And then you will become one of those voices.

The world is full of noises. I am at a street corner, waiting for the light to turn. A child no older than ten, ignorant of the rushing cars, steps out into the street. Then a screech—a shout(?)—and mumbling; syllables, fragments, ticks and ums. I do not see any of this, but the gurgling—it lingers.

Even in the Isles of the Blessed—when the spirits dream, they too yell and scream in defiance. “Forgive me, forgive me!” In the piles of wretched, pure sweat. Some angels would have to come and hush the poor tortured souls back to tranquility, before they float back amidst the delicately strung stars and luscious gardens.

This is happening. The constant reminding—how you tell me again and again, the woes that wait, the pain that persists, the voices that remain. This has happened before. A shadows casts before our eyes, and we quiver.

When the fighting first began, we didn’t think that death would be so close. It was always a matter of distance. Hundreds, thousands of miles away, with nameless people who were of no relation to me. Until I could hear the blasts from outside my apartment, the whole thing seemed like a story: a series of events told to me through a pane of light, shone through the thin fabric of processed words and images. And then there was the rattle of the windows, the piercing of the wind, the raspy breaths, the flood of vicious blood that swam beneath the soles of my feet as I hid from the darkness, in the darkness. From then on, the voices wouldn’t stop.

Life—death—the cycle of pain. We go round and round, fleeing from the warped circle, crawling away. Uprooting the weeds, round and round and—but hush, the crackling fire continues. The dark sky enveloping everything. All things said, nothing done, nothing left but the haunted reverberation of first words and last breaths.

In terms of how things felt, I could never say. Afterwards, when people asked me, I would say that I was scared—terrified, even, quaking under the oppressive force of wanting to live, wanting to live for nothing, and then wanting to die, but afraid of the pain of dying, wishing the pain would go away and leave, like the sun setting, just to dim and sink under the horizon. Like a leaf, caught by the autumn wind, carried gently onto a bed of sweet grass. I was afraid. That’s how I knew I was still alive. How I lingered, my nails dug deep into the soil. My hands dirtied, for the sake of what? More fear? More pain?

There is a dream that is common: you wake up in your bed, and get up as usual. But in the middle of your routine, something happens. You can’t tell what it is, other than that it is strange, out of the ordinary, and very, very real. You walk back to your bed, to see yourself still sleeping, covered by the sheets, eyes closed. Then you rush to a mirror and look—what do you see? There’s nothing, of course. Nothing special, nothing spectacular. You are still there. You are still here. Wake up, you think. This is just a dream. You try pinching yourself, but there is no pain. You try screaming, but the sound is hollow and mute. You are free. You are awake. And you drift away, away from all the familiar places, flying farther and farther, until the world is but a tiny dot in the ocean of void.

I can’t breathe. The world is against me. Leave my purple face where it is. Let whatever happens,

happen.

There’s a place I remember going as a child—it’s a big room, with beige walls, high ceilings, and large windows. There’s an older woman there, maybe in her fifties or so, wearing a lavender dress. She comes up to me and asks if I want to play. I nod enthusiastically—and how she laughs, throws her head back and gives me her hand. Her hand is warm. We go outside, where it’s partly cloudy, and the flowers are dancing. The sky explodes and limbs fall, splattering blood everywhere. Accelerated shrieks zoom past me, shot through the air. Birds drop from the sky like snowflakes, feathers scattering all over the ground, cloaking the stained surface with a thin bed of grimness. We lie down, cast our eyes away. All the breathing stops, our lungs collapse, our minds atrophy, spinning out, circling around the hole in our hearts.

Beyond. Beyond the mountain. Beyond the great, central mountain. Of the universe. You. Me. A fallen forest. Uprooted by the poison soil, the shock of the impact. Where the earth gathers. Where the heavens collect at night. Into a shining beam. Beaming down. Lifting up. Cracking the stones. Blistering the rivers.

Behold the fragments—the last bits of sanity. What lingers in between. In the spaces. In the wretched voicelessness splitting the sour muttering. This is. This is where we choose to come, until the stars dim. Until the echoes sink into great forms, into us, and we have become mere echoes: repeating, repeating, tongues, numb, repeating, never, ending, always, always, repeating, reaping, repeating.

Finally, a sunlit room. The warmth of afternoon, spreading across the shimmering hardwood floor. “Some tea?” I nod. My eyes turn to you. My dear, is this what heaven is like? And oh, how you laughed at that. You laughed so brilliantly, naturally. It echoed through the entire hall, radiating, and I could only laugh with you. Then you stopped. Your eyes were on the verge of tears. You stared deep into me, pupils full of pain. My stomach dropped and my throat choked up. It was quiet. The windows sparkled.