-Niangthianmuang S. Ngaihte

Prologue:

You have run out of reasons to stay alive. 

One. 

You were born in the heat of summer. You grew waxing and waning, contradicting yourself in every fold, struggling with others and struggling with you. Thoughts swim in your head, crashing into each other and the only voice you hear is your own. How long will Summer last? 

It was your seventeenth birthday when you had realised that you will never love yourself. And your eighteenth, when you realised you can learn to hate yourself less. 

Two. 

You keep your eyes open when the priest begins his prayers. They all eat the bread and drink the grape wine, the supposed flesh and blood of the saviour, while you count the number of times the candles flicker inside the chapel.  You keep in mind to count the ones before the alter, on the sides of the empty- on- weekdays corridors and of course, the one inside your head. 

You had lost your faith when you saw how a deacon treated his wife, how women in your community were inferior citizens and how everyone accepted it. First it came as a repulsion from the subjugation caused by patriarchy and you raised your voice against it. And when the men and women defended their sexism with patriarchy and their patriarchy with their religion, you lost your faith. The flame in the candle inside of you extinguished. 

Three.

You carve out your name on the pumpkin. October is the first month of your personal year, and the last day is your first. You celebrate new year, and carve out every reflection of you in the pumpkin. 

It is in your pumpkin that you see a self portrait made with mangled hands. And this self portrait hardly looks like you, but is a sketch of father and mother and sisters and friends and teachers— nothing that belongs to you except perhaps the pumpkin itself. 

Four. 

Mother gives thanks, while you struggle to collect your thoughts. Sitting round the table laid with choice food, your tongue feels limp like a damp rag used for wiping dirty tables in some roadside hotel. There is no taste in your mouth. 

This is the first time that there is everything to be happy about. No mismatched socks, no teenage angst, no deaths, no sickness. And yet you feel like gnawing your limbs out, piece by piece. Unhappiness is wretched when there is really no reason to not be happy but you are not happy and you feel that you ought to be happy but you can’t feel happy when you’re not happy. You feel like the worst sinner for not appreciating what you have, but you really don’t know how to appreciate a room of unwanted gold when your eyes had always been fixed on bronze bars. 

Five. 

You peep when you hear Santa’s steps. It’s been years and years and you still put up a stocking. You’ve never believed in the existence of a Santa Claus but you still did so, because everyone else did so, too. When you saw father put something wrapped in green in your stocking, even though you had always known that he’d been playing Santa, something broke in you. 

Now you still put up the stocking, even though no one does so anymore. Or maybe you do so precisely because no one does so anymore. You have grown too much like yourself, that your self is now everything and anything everyone else is not. 

Six. 

You have run out of reasons to die. 

Epilogue:

The flowers don’t smell like you. The slab isn’t warm; the six feet of earth between you and I muffles all the words that travels to you. In place of you, stands a stone with your name. 

But the cold marble slab is not you.