The Last Words Of A Shooting Star

 

Would you cry if I die?

As they lower me into the cradle of the cold earth, would yours be the strong arm holding the coffin, or the gentle hand wielding the shovel, pulling the covers over my stiffening body as I tether between two worlds? Tucking me into the sleep I’ve been dreaming of for far too long, finally reaping the overflowing interest I’ve been collecting for the sleepless sleep I’ve offered at the altar where even ghosts have ceased to kneel, where candles still burn at the foot of a throne long since crumbled to stone.

Would you be so kind as to warm the muddied soil in your hands before closing the tomb?  

I run cold in my sleep, you see.  

I think that’s why sleep abandoned me the day my mother stopped tucking the corners of the blanket between the bedframe and the wall to ward off the chill that bled in through the stone. She used to seal me in tight until I could no longer roll around, my tiny body swaddled in stillness as I drift off to a dreamless sleep. 

Pease be merciful. Send me off in warmth.  

She worries you know, my mother, I mean.  

The shroud is too thin for a winter burial, and the wood won't keep out the drizzle.  

She would hate to know her child went cold again. Once from the warmth of her womb, and now again into the hollow darkness of the tomb. One cord bloodied, tethering me to her as I came screaming into life, this one, clean and invisible, disappearing beneath the ground only to return empty. An exodus and a homecoming both bathed in stillness.

I’ve been waiting for far too long.  

My pockets are full of debt I need to cash in, a crumpled scrap of paper where I wrote down every night I lost to tossing and turning. Staring at the peeling paint on the ceiling, wondering if the neighbors above were already asleep. Tracing the cracks with tired eyes, wishing they would just relent and collapse, bury me gently in my bed. Let the weight of stone and bricks lull me into something close to peace.  

I told a friend once, about those nights. She looked at me, horror in her eyes, and said, “That’s not a normal thing to think about, you know.”  

Oh, I think not sleeping for two weeks straight is actually the more abnormal thing. Sorry we can’t all sip chamomile tea and scribble five things into a stupid gratitude journal before curling into a twelve-hour, sedative-induced dreamscape.

But yeah, sure. I’m the not normal one.

I want to lay my head and rest, to close my eyes and not have threads of thoughts pulling into countless directions, my own mind conspiring against me. It would be long dead by then, my brain, just atrophied fat and water, the blood having long since dried, how futile is this body of ours, and what makes it so special, so singularly worthy of thousands of years of evolution and extinction, of the earth cracking open and folding in on itself, fire and typhoons and glaciers wiping and swallowing everything else just for it to birth its highest form of life, interwoven sinew and stardust. Immortal in its certain mortality. All this for it to crumble down, just another lifeless and cold body on the ground, a good for nothing pile of rotting flesh like any other. 

Hundreds of millions of neurons letting go of each other's grasp like dancers at the end of the act, their fingertips loosening, their lifetimes ending mid-step. Seconds, that’s all it takes, for one lifetime to wither away with the blowing wind. Minutes, and the puppet show of a lifetime folds in on itself.

Did I at least make use of that brain? Did I write it down? Not just the polished things, the good prose, the clever metaphors, but the small, stupid life of me, because that is what it is, is it not? The bad coffee from that place two streets from my house, burnt and ashy like all of my regrets. My mother’s secret to the perfect cookies recipe, one pinch of salt, softened butter, and the patience I never had. The floorboard by my old bedroom door that groans betrayal if you step wrong, try to put your left foot first, be light on your toes, swift like an apology if you don't want it to wail in protest at the intrusion. That chipped orange mug, an old friend's gift I have kept far longer than I ever knew her, there is a small inscription on the bottom, remnants of permanent marker, two persistent Ps from life times ago, was it my eighteenth or nineteenth birthday I don't really recall, I do remember that she used to write only in neat cursive though, but my soap scrubbed it out, I had been meaning to change that soap but I never did, slippery little thing, broke too many dishes because of it, you'll find the half empty bottle by the sink, throw it out on your way out, please . 

Know me like that, if you can. In the way I stayed unfinished. In the things I never thought worth writing down, know me in the clutter and the beads I never managed to string together. Not in the scribbled margins of that Dickens book I hated, not the half finished stories on my laptop, my mercurial mind never satisfied or pleased as I chose the perfect beads for this sentence or another, smart, sparkling, better.

Did I clean my room or will there be dirty laundry on the floor, I'd hate for you to go through the hassle of cleaning the last remnants of my life, just throw them out please, don't bother with the washing machine, my father used to say clothes have deaths handprints on them, forty nights before he'd say, signs of the imminent death, the upcoming appointment in Samara you can't escape. He was right I think, maybe that's why I wore that dress I had pushed back in the cupboard, why I called my sister a week ago. How are the kids, oh you know, fine. Silence, two foreigners using their hands to sign when language failed, hers is rusty on my tongue, few mismatched words that remain in a neat drawer in my mind, just under that German course I took in high school. Good, take care of yourself. I don't try to think of the last time I told her I loved her, some things are better left under a layer of paint in an old shared bedroom, she knows. I think. 

I hope. 

Will someone find the shell I picked up on that beach trip years ago, the prettiest thing I have ever owned, so insignificantly slipped between my jewelry and old receipts in the drawer by my bed? Will you wonder why I kept it? I don't even remember the name of that beach anymore, only that the water was freezing and my fingers went numb trying to hold onto something smooth and whole, I was happy that day, a rare occurrence you must think, but I wasn't always sad you know, I had my fair share of sunlight. Can you throw it back in the water, or leave by the shore, let it be someone else's most possessed jewel. 

Do me a favor, don’t read my journals. Burn them, maybe, or bury them beneath a tree. They’re full of me, but only the fragile ghosts of me that could survive the execution of my pen. Something strange happens to me sometimes, I would open my mouth and nothing would escape the seal of my lips, the sound dying somewhere between the destined oxygen still trapped in my lungs and the meat of my cheeks I have presses between my molars, blood and iron spilling to mark the crime scene, linguistic vocaliscide. And I would trace my tongue against the back of my teeth, the tip of it picking wayward letters, sticking them into a resemblence of a sentence. And even then, they're not true, not really. Only the versions of myself I could stand to look at, half-erased and half-lied. Give me the kindness of leaving the rest unwritten. Don't strip it all away from me, sharp nails carving their path on my blue painted limbs, don’t undress me down to the bone. It’s cold, you see. And I’ve lived in this sadness long enough that it fits me like a second skin, this sadness warms me, so let me go with it. Let me lie swaddled in it, this soft, quiet grief of a life half-lived, half-loved. Let it fill the hollow places of the coffin, vestiges of a past life, worn and weathered from how hard my palms clutched them. I wonder about my last breath, would it be exhaled in a soft puff of air, my life becoming a small footnote fitting between two facing brackets of a parenthesis, giving back what I took from the world that very first time, a life sustaining on one breath that had been trapped in my lungs for decades now. Standing at the checkpoint, giving it all back in the same condition it has been handed out to me, this withered body and the air that had inhabited it, my soul and the torments that had chained it. And so if I must take something to my name, let it be my sadness, it has the marks of my teeth on it, and let the burning pyre take what’s left, charred flesh and papyrus, bone and ink and wood.

If they ask about me, don't be so kind to bury the bad with me, for nothing will remain if you do. Tell them I killed every plant I owned, the green wilting under hands that loved them too clumsily, too intermittently, twenty days of drought, and then one day of flood. I was never kind in my love, only negligent or overwhelming. Starved them quiet, then drowned them in apology, nothing or too much. Never just enough. Tell them I left dishes in the sink for days, that I forgot birthdays, that I vanished from conversations like smoke slipping through cracks in the ceiling. Tell them I was selfish, often. Quiet, often. Hard to love, mostly.

Tell them I hoarded empty perfume bottles because they smelled like moments I couldn't keep, childhood clothes I never gave away for the dream of the child I never got to meet along the way. That I broke way too many things, glasses, promises, hearts, my own, with equal, graceless hands. A black thumb they call it, black indeed. 

Tell them that greed consumed me, my desire to not be forgotten making me scatter myself like breadcrumbs across everything I touched, in the dust covering the shelves I never cleaned and between the pages of the books I keep under my bed, and in the doodles on the walls of every house I've ever occupied. Tell them that I was starved for remembrance in a world built on the pillars of forgetfulness. I would lay at night and think of centuries ahead, rolling the years around my fingers like rosary beads, when the graveyard I haunt would be long gone, would an artist's hands take the mud where a speck of my remains lay, mold it in their hands, gentle caresses that would satiate a past life's longing, or would it be a farmer instead, turning the dirt with rough calloused hands, unknowingly sowing me into the belly of the earth, a single grain waiting for winter's reaping. Would my body finally give something after it had lived as an inhospitable land, all greedy wanting and insatiable hunger? Would I be good for something, at last? Even if it’s just for an ephemeral sprout or to feed the hungry worms. 

Even if it’s just to rot right.

Don't eulogize me in the half-lies I wore to step out of my house every day, if you must say one thing, say that I have lived, like all those before me, I lived. 

The sun is setting, and I have been waiting for far too long already. I shall go to bed now, please don't forget to cover me in warmth. I run cold, you know that by now. 

Oh, and before I go. Please, don't cry when I die. 

Achoik Tahiri