Beware Of Lookalikes

Unspoken. Unsaid.

People use them like twins.

They are not.

One has no anatomy.

The other is a headless corpse.

That is the difference.

Unspoken is a thought 

still looking for language.

A pressure behind the ribs.

A fist.

A funeral before the coffin.

A child knowing something is wrong

long before anyone gives it a name.

Unspoken is innocent.

Unsaid is not.

Unsaid has vocabulary.

Unsaid knows the sentence.

Unsaid has rehearsed it

in the shower,

in the car,

in the courtroom

of the skull

at three in the morning.

Unsaid has punctuation.

It has considered the consequences.

Then it decided to shut the fuck up.

That is not silence.

That is a decision.

We have beautiful names for decisions like that.

Restraint.

Maturity.

Professionalism.

Keeping the peace.

Being the bigger person.

Human beings are astonishing.

We can turn cowardice into etiquette

if we give it a nice enough word.

So the sentence waits.

Not in the mouth.

Somewhere between

the thought

and the tongue, 

there is security check.

Every truth arrives with luggage.

What are you carrying?

A confession.

Declare it.

I love you.

Anything else?

I am angry.

Anything else?

I never forgave you.

Anything else?

I was never happy here.

Anything else?

No. Of course not.

We are very good at emptying our pockets

before the truth gets searched.

And that little country 

between unspoken and unsaid

is where we do it.

That is where the murder weapon goes.

That is where the apology loses its spine.

That is where love is stripped of its vowels and sent back to the factory.

That is where a person learns the difference between "I can't say it" and "I won't".

The first is a wound.

The second is architecture.

Give it enough years

and the architecture becomes a house.

Give it a family

and it becomes tradition.

Give it a country

and it becomes culture.

Give it generations

and nobody remembers

there was ever anything to say.

That is the frightening part.

The unspoken can become unsaid.

The unsaid can become normal.

Normal can become invisible.

And invisible things are the easiest things to inherit.

Ask any family what happened.

Watch them look at one another.

Nobody knows.

Everybody knows.

There it is.

The oldest language we have.

A room full of people speaking fluently without saying the sentence.

We call this peace.

Sometimes it is a war with good manners.

Sometimes the thing between two people is not distance.

It is a word both of them know

and neither of them is willing to own.

Sometimes it is a name.

Sometimes a truth.

Sometimes a goodbye postponed so long, it becomes a personality.

And sometimes

it is simply

"no".

The smallest word.

The most expensive.

No, I don't love you.

No, you didn't deserve that.

No, I am not okay.

No, I don't forgive you.

No, I don't want to be the person you made me.

No.

Two letters.

A life can fit inside them.

A marriage can die between them.

A child can become an adult

trying to earn permission to say them.

And perhaps that is what lives between the two words.

Not silence.

Not absence.

A border.

On one side, the thing 

you have not yet found the courage to name.

On the other, the thing 

you named perfectly and buried anyway.

Between them stands a person

holding a sentence in both hands

like a loaded gun, calling it

peace.

How Do You Bury The Dying?

I am losing my hair.

Not enough to be interesting.

I am not bald.

I am simply experiencing

a slow administrative reduction

in the population above my eyebrows.

There are still plenty of them.

That is how I know this is serious.

If they were all gone,

I could at least call it something.

Baldness.

A condition. A noun.

A problem with paperwork.

But this is thinning.

A verb.

Something happening

while I am trying to get somewhere else.

Every morning I find them.

On the pillow.

In the sink.

Caught in the collar of yesterday's shirt.

They have started turning up in places

where I don't remember inviting them.

I pick them out and throw them away.

Sometimes I count.

Not because

I expect the number to tell me anything.

Because counting

makes disappearance look measurable.

I have always been surprisingly calm around statistics.

It is the ones still attached to me that bother me.

They are thinner now.

Some of them have become so fine

that I have to tilt my head under the bathroom light

to confirm they are still hair.

A few look like nature's way of saying, "technically, still hair".

I have changed shampoos.

I have read articles

by men with suspiciously full heads of hair

telling me not to worry.

I worried. 

Quietly. With citations.

But the more I watched the hair disappear,

the more, a question began bothering me.

Which one was the last?

Not the last hair I will ever have.

That is easy.

I can probably predict 

the general direction of this negotiation.

I mean the last good one.

The last thick one.

The last one

that belonged to the version of my head

I never thought I would have to miss.

There must have been one.

It fell somewhere.

A pillow. A drain.

My shoulder.

The back of a black shirt.

Maybe I brushed it away without looking.

Maybe I was late for work.

Maybe I was thinking about money.

Maybe I was in love.

Maybe I was miserable.

Maybe I was happy.

It doesn't matter.

I didn't know.

That is the part I cannot forgive.

Not the hair.

The ignorance.

We imagine endings as events.

A door closing.

A train leaving.

Someone saying “I think we should talk.”

A final kiss.

A final photograph.

A final breath.

We like our endings with subtitles.

But most things do not leave like that.

They thin. That is all.

Nothing dramatic.

Nothing anyone would interrupt dinner for.

Just less.

Then less again.

Then one day you look at the thing

you have been looking at your entire life

and discover

you no longer remember when it was whole.

That frightens me more than death.

Death has the decency to arrive with its name tag.

This is worse.

This is a disappearance

that asks you to keep calling it present.

So I have started looking at my hair

like an idiot.

Not checking whether I am bald.

Checking whether I am still me.

As though the answer 

might be hiding between two strands.

As though one of them might still remember

the exact shape of my head

before everything started becoming less.

And sometimes I catch myself

searching old photographs.

Not for my face. For the hair.

There it is. Thicker. Stupider.

Completely unaware

that one day

I would enlarge the photograph

to inspect it like evidence.

Look at that.

Look how much I had.

Look how little I knew.

That is the real cruelty.

You never know which ordinary thing is about to become a memory.

You don't know which morning will be the last morning you get to have without knowing it.

You don't know.

Because if you did,

you would behave differently.

You would look longer.

Listen harder.

Stay five more minutes.

You would understand

that ordinary

is not the opposite of precious.

It is how precious things usually leave.

Quietly. Without announcement. Without witnesses.

Without giving you the smallest courtesy of knowing you should remember.

And perhaps that is why

I keep thinking about that last good hair.

I want to know where it fell.

I want to know whether I noticed.

I want to know whether I touched it.

I want to know whether, 

for one stupid second,

I held the last piece of something

I would spend years trying to keep

and threw it away.

I will never know.

Because the last hair did not know it was the last hair.

And I did not know I was losing it.

We keep waiting for goodbyes to become visible.

They never do. 

One day something is still here.

The next day it isn't.

And somewhere between those two days

you were supposed to notice.

I didn't.

I am still not bald.

There is still hair on my head.

There is still time.

There are still people I can call.

Still rooms I can return to.

Still things I can say.

Which is why, tomorrow morning,

I will probably stand in the bathroom

and complain about the hair in the sink.

I will pick it up.

Count it.

Throw it away.

And never once ask

whether I am holding the last thing

I will ever get to lose

without knowing

I was saying goodbye.

Black Is My Favourite Colour

Everything that's hurled at me

will have to earn its keep.

The insult.

The envy.

The humiliation.

The things I cannot forgive.

The things I cannot forget.

Nothing gets to wound me

and leave empty-handed.

I will not make meaning

out of suffering.

Meaning is too generous.

I will grind it all into black ink,

wring the bitterness

until it gives me something useful,

and fling it at the page

until the page remembers what it cost me.

I will not turn pain into wisdom.

That would be such a waste.

Wisdom is 

what people make out of suffering

when they want to forgive it.

I don't.

I will keep the wound exactly as ugly as it was.

Then I will give it a punchline.

I will give the humiliation a microphone.

I will give the insult better grammar.

I will give the people who hurt me the immortality they never asked for.

Not as heroes. Not as villains. As ingredients.

Everything gets recycled.

Some things become compost.

Some become autopsies.

Some become satire.

I suppose I have always had a weakness for black.

Hangman

First,

learn to say yes

before anybody has finished asking.

It saves time.

Yes, sir.

Yes, ma'am.

Yes, of course.

Yes, absolutely.

Yes, I understand.

You don't. That's fine.

Understanding

was never part of the syllabus.

Obedience is simpler.

Then learn the important words:

well-behaved.

good family.

good job.

good boy.

Nobody will tell you what good means.

They will keep saying it until you are too old to ask.

Get educated. Get employed.

Take the loan. Buy the house.

Buy the sofa that nobody is allowed to sit on.

Buy curtains to hide the windows.

Buy insurance for the life you are too afraid to live.

Marry someone nice. Not someone you love.

Love is volatile. Nice has documents.

Have children.

Give them names

you spent three months choosing

and a future

you spend thirty years trying not to resent.

Tell them:

Study hard. Be practical.

Don't talk back. Don't make trouble.

Think about your future.

And one afternoon

you will hear them saying it in your voice.

That will be the first time you understand inheritance.

At work, sit properly.

Don't slouch. Don't swear. Don't ask why.

Laugh when the boss laughs.

There is always a boss. There is always laughter.

There is always somebody

standing somewhere above you

who has mistaken altitude for depth.

When they give you more work, say 'thank you".

When they ask if you're happy, say "of course".

The mouth must learn to lie

before the heart learns to stop expecting honesty.

At home,  when your mother says she is tired,

say,  " get some rest".

Never ask what she is tired of.

When your father stops speaking, leave him alone.

Men are not supposed to have reasons for being sad.

They are supposed to have cholesterol.

When your wife cries, hold her.

When you want to cry, go to the bathroom.

Close the door. Turn on the tap. Cry quietly.

The neighbours must not think the family is having problems.

Brush your teeth. Spit. Look down.

There is your face swimming in the sink.

Do not recognise it.

Cognizance causes complications.

Gargle. Loudly.

Yes, sir.

Yes, ma'am.

Yes, my lord.

Excellent.

Your tongue is clean now.

Your life isn't.

That's alright.

Tomorrow is another day to pretend.

Give it time.

You will become very good at it.

You will learn how to say I'm fine

with your chest full of furniture burning.

You will learn how to be delighted

for the people who got what you wanted.

Eventually, you will learn the most useful word

of all: sacrifice.

It is a beautiful word.

It makes genocides sound holy.

Years will pass.

Your children will grow.

Your parents will shrink.

Your hair will leave like it never knew courtesy.

Your knees will revolt in ways you were taught not to.

You will ignore them. Of course.

You have been ignoring yourself for years.

Then one ordinary Tuesday, nothing will happen.

Nothing.

You will simply be drinking tea 

and you will finally let it sink in:

you have spent your entire life

making yourself easier 

for other people to live with.

And you will laugh.

Because what else is there?

You will laugh so hard the tea will come out through your nose.

It will hurt. 

Good.

Pain is useful 

when it arrives 

without an appointment.

Look around.

The house. The job. The marriage. 

The respectable clothes. The respectable opinions.

The respectable little corpse

you have been carrying inside your chest.

All of it. Yours.

You built it. You paid for it.

You defended it. You called it a life.

And suddenly you will want to do

something completely stupid.

Not heroic. Not meaningful.

Not socially transformative.

Something useless.

Something your obituary

will not know how to describe.

So you break the cup.

Just one.

Your wife comes running.

Your child looks up.

Your neighbour hears.

Someone asks, "What happened?"

And for once, 

you don't have an answer prepared.

You look at the pieces. You look at your hands.

You look at the tiny bloodstain where the broken ceramic has opened your foot.

And you realise, you are standing.

Not kneeling.

Not apologising.

Not explaining.

Standing. 

Barefoot. Bleeding.

Completely fucking useless

to everybody

who spent their life

teaching you how to behave.

And somewhere inside you,

something small,

something badly raised,

something you have been

beating into silence since childhood,

finally bares its teeth.

Do not call it freedom.

Do not call it courage.

Call it nothing.

For once,

let a thing exist

without turning it into a lesson.

Stand there.

Let them stare. Let them worry.

Let them call you selfish. Let them call you mad.

Let them say, "This isn't like you!"

And finally,

finally, 

they will be right.

Because the whole point

of becoming a good citizen

was to become someone

who could be trusted not to make a mess.

So make one.

Break another cup.

Open the window.

Take off the respectable shirt.

Spit the tea onto the floor.

Say the thing you have been swallowing for thirty years.

And when the old voice inside your head

clears its throat and asks

"What will people say?",

look at the blood on your foot.

Look at the broken cup.

Look at the life 

you almost managed to live 

without ever entering.

Then smile.

And say, "For once, let them."

Eight Deaths & A Life

At conception,

you were almost nothing.

A wet little argument

between two cells

about whether the universe

needed another mouth.

Nobody knew your name.

Nobody knew your face.

Nobody knew

you were going to hate coriander,

fall in love badly, lie about being fine,

and eventually become

the kind of person who says,

"I don't need anything."

You hadn't even arrived

and already you were disappointing the future.

Then they ended you.

Chemical dissipation.

You never saw daylight.

You never got to find out

whether you were beautiful or ugly

or merely unfortunate in the way most of us are.

No one missed you until they had imagined missing you.

That is the strange thing about unborn people:

you can grieve an entire lifetime that never happened.

Your mother did. For a brief while.

Then you died before you were born.

This time there had been a face.

A tiny face floating in a machine

that made everyone very quiet.

Someone had already said your name.

Someone had already bought something small.

Someone had already imagined your first day at school.

Someone had already wondered whether you would be tall.

Then your heart decided it had done enough.

The room went silent.

Your mother went home with an empty body

and a future that had nowhere to live.

Then you were born.

And you died eleven months later.

Eleven months.

Long enough to learn your mother's smell.

Long enough for your father to discover 

that a human being can weigh almost nothing

and still break a man in half.

Long enough for everyone to fall in love with a face

that never got the chance to wrinkle.

At seven, you died.

Now there were teeth marks on pencils.

A favourite colour.

A monster under the bed 

that was apparently more believable

than the monster called adulthood.

There were drawings. Hundreds of them.

You had drawn the sun too large.

Your mother kept them.

Of course she did.

She couldn't throw away the sun.

At sixteen, you died.

Now you had secrets.

You had discovered that adults 

were mostly children with better lies.

You had kissed someone

and spent three weeks pretending it hadn't mattered.

You had one song 

you would never admit made you cry.

You had started becoming someone.

That is when death gets especially vulgar.

Because now there is a person to kill.

Your friends grew older. You didn't.

They learned new jokes. New bodies.

New ways to ruin themselves.

Every few years someone would say,

"He would've been thirty by now."

As though thirty were a place you had failed to reach.

At thirty-four, you died.

You had become the man 

your sixteen-year-old self

would have crossed the street to avoid.

You had a job.

A bad back.

A password you had forgotten twice.

You had learned that love is not enough

but loneliness is somehow worse.

You had bought things for a future

that kept moving

like a cat you were trying to catch.

You had started saying,

"Maybe next year."

Next year 

is one of the most successful

serial killers in human history.

Then you died.

Someone found your unfinished coffee.

Nobody knows why that detail always survives.

Perhaps because a half-drunk cup

is the closest the living ever get to understanding 

how abruptly a person can disappear.

At fifty-eight, you died.

You had become the oldest person

in some of your memories.

Your father was gone.

Someone called you "Dad"

without you remembering

when it had started sounding like a middle name.

You had stories you told too often.

Secrets you told nobody.

A name you still couldn't say

without feeling something move behind your ribs.

You had spent decades becoming yourself.

Then you died.

Imagine spending fifty-eight years building a house

only to discover you were the tenant.

At eighty-nine, you died.

By now, everyone said you had lived.

They said it kindly.

They said it as though

you had finally completed something.

But perhaps, there was never such thing as a completed life.

Perhaps every life 

is just a collection

of doors you didn't open.

People. Cities. Bodies.

Versions of yourself you abandoned

because they became too expensive to maintain.

You were not the person you could have been.

You were merely the person who remained

after everyone else had died.

Because that is what nobody tells you.

You don't die once. 

You die constantly.

The child disappears. 

The teenager disappears. 

The lover disappears. 

The coward disappears.

The idiot who thought he would live forever disappears.

The person who swore he would never become his father disappears.

Then one day you become him. 

Then he disappears too.

And we call this growing up.

As though there were something noble

about being slowly murdered by time.

So perhaps the question isn't:

"When does life begin?"

Perhaps it is:

"Which death do we call birth?"

Because you were alive when you were conceived.

Alive when you were wanted. Alive when you were lost.

Alive for eleven months. Alive for seven years.

Alive for sixteen. Alive for thirty-four.

Alive for fifty-eight. Alive for eighty-nine.

And inside each of those lives 

was another one waiting to happen.

And another. And another.

Until finally there was nowhere left for you to become.

So you died.

And everyone cried for the person you had been.

Nobody cried for the people you never got to kill.

The Islands Beneath My Skin

I have known women

who left behind

climates I still live inside.

Some left behind the smell of food

from kitchens that disappeared

before I learned I was still hungry.

Some left behind sentences

that still arrive before my own thoughts, 

speak before I do.

Some left behind a silence so precise

I mistook it for peace.

There were women who taught me

that a person can be built from another person's belief.

A few words. A little faith.

A hand resting on a shoulder

at the exact moment the world felt too heavy.

And suddenly,

a boy begins to imagine himself

as something larger

than the name the world had given him.

There were women who taught me

that losing someone is not always absence.

Sometimes, someone remains everywhere.

In songs. In streets. 

In the way you pause before answering.

In habits you never noticed you inherited.

There were women who sat beside me

through ordinary days

and somehow convinced time to move differently.

The kind of miracles you fail to recognise

because miracles are supposed to arrive with thunder.

And there were women who taught me

the lesson I never wanted.

That a person can become a weapon

when another needs a story.

That truth can be stretched 

until it fits the hands holding it.

That sometimes,

someone does not reduce you because they hate you.

Sometimes,

they just need you smaller to make themselves larger.

The strange thing is,

I cannot separate the wounds from the gifts.

The same world that gave me my softest memories

also gave me my sharpest scars.

The same hands that taught me how to hold on

also taught me how easily humans let go.

So I do not write them as angels.

Angels do not disappoint.

I do not write them as demons.

Demons do not leave behind

pieces of themselves

you spend years mistaking for your own.

I write them as I have known them.

Incomplete.

Beautiful in places.

Terrifying in others.

Tender when they still knew how.

Capable of building worlds. 

Capable of burning them.

And perhaps that is the only honest story I can tell.

Not who they were. Not what they did.

But what they left behind after passing through me.

404 (Unabridged)

Every now and then,

my phone reminds me:

deleted items leave residue.

And I keep wondering

about all the things we delete:

the photographs,

the messages,

the names we stop searching for,

what they leave behind,

if anything.

Or whether deletion

is just another word

for moving something

somewhere we can no longer see.

Because the strange thing

about erasing something

is that the space it occupied

doesn't disappear with it.

It stays there,

quietly remembering

what used to be.

And I wonder

about all the things

we've deleted from our lives:

did they ever really leave,

or did we simply become

too good at pretending

we couldn't find them?

What technology couldn't, how could biology ever?