I look at what lies beneath my shoes. Dirt all over. A few patches of tiny green grass dancing in the free air. You give death a bad name. I hissed to myself and i sigh, and i sit on top of the dirt. Pulling out baby-grass under my toes.
I look at you now, a mere cold stone. They could’ve given you a sleek exquisite marble, but here you are, a carcass slumped beneath what appears to be a chunk of formless limestone. I don’t know anything about stone. Who gives a damn? Is it matter what stone lies above us once we’re down there? Life could give me a piece of stick as my memorial and I couldn’t care less. I’m not going try to remember myself once i’m gone. Just like how they don’t remember you. Your family, your friends. Maybe it’s them. They give death a bad name. They gave your death a bad name.
You are of bones now. A ghoul with no name. Tombstone of blank space and anonymity. There are only two scenarios i can think of: Somebody out there lost you, but didn’t want you and didn’t bother to care, Or you’ve lived a life of complete solitude, loneliness caught you up faster than the angel of death himself and you’ve been a ghost long before you died.
But at least, death embraces you, doesn’t he? You never really alone for death is your very bestfriend.
Here, have a bar of snickers. I put it on top of your tombstone. For refreshment. You know nobody’s going to bring you a bouquet of fresh flowers, nobody will come and weep at your grave, wailing about how they long for your warmth, nobody’s going to sing you eulogy, Nobody will ever pass on the sound of your name to your grandchildren. It’s just you and i under this vast tuesday sky now. I know you must’ve been rolling your eyes in the grave right now. How could this living flesh willing to walked pass the row of the dead to sit on top of a mound of soil that belongs to no one?
You see, i dont do good with another living flesh. I don’t do good with breathing under this stale-monochromatic life, with the world that is so unloving. But i do good with this: with this enveloping grief around you and i, with this faint darkness of ours: you with being unknown and aloneness, and me with my death infatuation.
My infatuation with death keeps growing in me, deep in my marrow. I’m more alive lying in the dark room thinking of solid soil that’s going to hug me and the eternal serenity i’ll have as a companion once I’m dead. I’m more alive thinking about death than actually walk above the ground. Because, just because i think i’d better off gone than to sink my head to this worldly pain over and over again: i might as well be dead than running miles and miles away just to escape the worry of the future. This tiredness that is weighing my chest — the size of Sisyphus boulder. Or Love that I fought hard to grab only for it to pulverized inside my palm. And failure i reap after all the blood, sweat and tears I’ve carefully sowed.
Sometimes, this infatuation, this ill-mind had me stirred, had me thinking that i can only scream with a gun inside my mouth. This infatuation challenges me, whether seeking peace means pulling the gun’s trigger. Scary. It scares more than meeting eyes with any ghost. But then again, what’s more scary than being haunted by the ghost of heartache, the ghost of your past, present and future life?
I’m sorry, I’m rambling a lot, aren’t i? How’s your day? How’s your maggots companion? How’s the temperature? Is it lonelier down there? Would you be happy if i join you? Coffin-friends, side by side?
Maybe someday. Someday i’ll come to death on my own. When I’m finally not pain-driven, when i can finally see peace not as the prize through the shortcut, but as a prize i could always dig within me, the same way i dig out patience and strength in myself all these times. A prize worth fighting for. Just like life.
You can’t see this but the sun is setting right now somewhere at the edge of the milky way, the sky is in its most beautiful hue: the many shades of magenta and orange. Surely there’s no color more beautiful than the damp-darkness for you. I’m sorry I shouldn’t be speaking on behalf of you like this, but i know you wanted this. You wanted to be known, you wanted someone to slip your name in their prayers, so that your emptiness becomes full of peace, your tears seep into the earth and enrich the soil, and the trees and the flowers above ground will blissfully bloom and dance after feasting on your rotting corpse. May Mother earth takes you with every bit of love you have for the lonely living flesh like me, And that you can finally be alive for once, for once beyond death.
I’m still alive right here. Still talking to you. You’re not forgotten, you’re not alone. And if you can keep living in my memory, i can live and i will live in this flesh and bones too.
Let’s shame the death, let’s give death a bad name by going on, fighting the ill mind
and live.
