Buried

Corpses, bugs and feelings

You wanted me to come, you kept telling me to visit. Yes, I have been told I’m weird, that I think strangely, that my thought process is different, that I talk as if I had been living in a cave reading hieroglyphs, that I interact with others like I’ve never spoken to another human being before. Just like you. I felt like that made me act that way more strongly, subconsciously — I felt called out, self-conscious. I think about it and conclude: Is that it? I just can’t socialise? Is that all the consequence, the side effect of it all that I get? But if I get quiet enough, I can hear something growling, waiting for the slightest thing to happen to snap and get out.

What needs to happen, though? I’d love for it to finally hit rock bottom and see what it’s capable of doing out of me. Just like it did with you. You were screaming though, not growling. All the time. Sometimes you wouldn’t even let me sleep while you screamed in your dreams. I roll up a cigarette mixed with weed, like the ones you used to have, and I place it in front of you, or rather what remains of you. What would you think? What would you say? When it took control of you, I barely even knew you anymore.

You kept a record of how many days old I was, all the hair and nails I trimmed and a playlist of all the songs I ever said I liked. Even the ones you hated. You said you listened to it when I wasn’t there, and it made you feel better. Because you never felt good, did you? Something was always broken with you. I look at your picture on your grave, I took that. You’re trying to look serious, but you look funny. I barely have a few things left, out of all the things you had. Your mother handled it all, she used to talk to me all the time, and she said she still would. But it’s been years now, and she never got back after one Christmas. I don’t blame her, I guess I remind her too much of you.

We were inseparable, the world really brought us together. Your sofa, you and I, we watched the most awful films together, we fell asleep, we had breakfast, lunch and dinner, we read some books, we read so many articles about everything and nothing — history, anthropology, religion, we were little sages for a while, we drank so much, it was comforting. Your sofa, you and I. The three musketeers. Your sofa and I also saw you convulsing, and the only time you decided to shoot up yourself in front of us, and the time you showed us the inside of your flesh to let the bugs out. Your sofa just stayed quiet, but I couldn’t, I had to get you out of there. It was late, and none of your neighbours would help, because it would disrupt the building too much, and it wasn’t convenient. They all wanted to keep shooting themselves up.

I got you out by myself, even though it was snowing, and walked you to the hospital while you kept acting edgy and telling me I understood nothing and I was too stuck-up. I was crying and my tears and snot freezed on my face. I didn’t tell anyone, even though you would have, and the nurses told me to. I did it my way, I hid and handled it all myself. I missed appointments, exams, I just stayed with you all night and didn’t sleep. Like I did that time you had to get a stomach pumping. Fortunately, the patients were all different, and so were the nurses. So I could pretend it was the first time.

You kept saying there were bugs under your skin that hadn’t got out and gnomes speaking to you. I was used to you telling me that. You were mixing your prescription medication, alcohol, weed and speed whenever I wasn’t around, and we lived a bit far. You used to be so logical you sometimes said my feelings were invalid because they made no sense, but when I asked you where the bugs were, and you still said they were inside you, and that made no sense either.

I light up my own cigarette mixed with weed. I know it won’t feel good, but fuck it, it’s your birthday. No one will be here at midnight. This is my chance with you after so long. Happy birthday, cheers, I’ll always be older than you from now on, I tell you. The last time I saw you, I wasn’t fully aware I had given up, you know? I brought the books you had lent me back, and your clothes. I tried to make it seem like it was something casual, but you caught me and called me out. You started to throw all my things to the floor and telling me to fucking get them and keep them. I wanted to throw up, I had never felt so sad, broken and evil. Then we both cried, I yelled that it wouldn’t change anything for you to have your books back, and you told me to shut the fuck up. And then we hugged. And we didn’t say anything, but I knew, and I know you knew too.

I couldn’t keep you safe anymore, and you couldn’t keep me safe either. Your neighbours would always bang on your door demanding something, and it terrified me. You told me nothing was wrong, but you were lying. I knew you had got yourself into trouble, the kind you don’t get out of easily. The kind that dies with you, the kind you die for.

Weed tastes like fire and nausea. And it feels like seasickness and nightmares, why did you like this? The sky spins and it’s no longer just black, something green and purple is spilled and spinning all over, like a psychedelic pattern from the Rorschach test. All I ever did was drink a little beside you, and you looked tamed, but if I got out those four walls you became a maniac. I still think of you, I still imagine what it all would’ve been like. But you feel different now, I look at you again and you’re different, because I’m different.

You loved telling me your liver was serotonin deficient, and that if I ever left you, you would inhale all the helium for party balloons in your living room and die. As if you already knew something I didn’t yet. So when your brother told me they found you bleeding through your nose outside, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t even cry, at the time, it felt like a relief. You were better off this way, weren’t you? Rather than wasting all you had and consuming yourself, picking on your scabs. When he told me it wasn’t my fault, I felt like he was telling me the exact opposite. He said that because someone must’ve said I was to blame. Or maybe he thought I felt guilty.

I thought of Ariana Grande leaving Mac Miller and him dying after and how people blamed her. I said sorry to your mother and felt ridiculous right after, because why would I be sorry for her as if I wasn’t sad myself? I felt relieved though, not sad. I even got time to hate you before you left so that it didn’t hurt so badly. But after a while of you leaving me here, on this earth, all alone, I started feeling like I shouldn’t have brought your books back. I should have kept them. I should have kept your fucking books. The sky is full of shooting stars, and I cry for you for the first time since you left. My tears don’t let me breathe so I just choke on them while I try to keep smoking.

I could have dealt with your issues, I could have stood it all. I was just feeling hopeless because you had just spent everything you had for the month on alcohol and weed and speed. My heart was racing at random times, and I couldn’t sleep, but I could have saved you. And I should have saved you. Who was I to discard you like you were nothing? Like you didn’t matter as much as I did? Everything felt like nothing after you, and I daydreamt about the life we imagined together. We were so close to buying that van, you would’ve been driving all over the coastline, and you wouldn’t have had anything but your prescription drugs anymore. You just needed one last bit of help. And you asked me for it, and I didn’t give it to you, and now you’re dead, and I’ll forever be lonely, and I don’t know if I will ever see you again wherever you are. You just came to shape the way I perceive love and then left, or rather, I made you leave.

I cry so much, the tears on my lap feel like I peed myself. And then it feels like a little trickle of water is going down the small hill where you are. After I finish smoking, I put the butt down and when I try to step on it, the water is covering my feet, right to my ankles. My entire legs and butt are drenched from sitting down, but I hadn’t noticed it at all, I was too busy crying for you.

He didn’t kill himself, a voice says. What the…, I say, and look around. And I see a gnome, barely a few centimetres tall, he has a sparse, long beard and is skinny, dressed in white and red. Surprised?, he asks. I don’t say anything, and he talks again. He didn’t kill himself, he would have used the helium, you know that. Why are you telling me this?, I ask. Because you wanted to know, he replies. What do I do with that information?, I ask. Do what you will, he says, but I would ask his neighbours below.

I look at the gnome, thinking I must be too sensitive to weed. They were the ones banging on his door, remember?, he asks, rhetorically. I consider telling him to go away and leave me alone, but I don’t want to argue with a hallucination. He would have done it for you, he says. When I look at your grave, the cigarette I had left on top of it is nothing but ashes forming a straight line and a butt.

I run away from the cemetery and go back home. My palms are all itchy as I take my clothes off and put my pyjamas on. My entire arms are covered in hives and bumps. They itch. I must have touched something, a nettle, no one grooms the cemetery plants. But as I sit down on my bed, my thighs are also itching, the hives are descending to my calves. I scratch my arms and legs softly with my fingertips, but it’s not enough. As I start feeling the itchiness on my chest and back, I start scratching with my nails, stronger and stronger each time. I stand up to look in the mirror, and the bumps are all moving beneath my skin. I gasp. It can’t be anything but bugs. It’s the same bugs that you felt. They were waiting for me, and I should have never been to your grave.