frank
i’ve been spending a lot of time writing about frank recently and i’ve decided to just paste it all down here. every piece of prose, every note, every poem. everything. he was always the first to read everything i wrote: my kindest critic. the most beautiful soul. i miss him more than i know how to say out loud and i’m just hoping that he gets to read all of this wherever he might be now
things that i have learned about grief
life goes on. this might be the worst part. the person you love more than anyone in the entire world is dead and you are still going to go to school tomorrow. you eat, and you sleep, and you wake up the next morning. you don’t want to, but things keep moving no matter how hard you try to stop them.
you will not sleep right. ever again
you will wear the same clothes for days in a row. you don’t have the energy to change out of them. you’re so tired
you don’t understand it, but you are quietly beyond desperate to not be alone. you will text your brother and ask him if he can have dinner with you, even though you used to relish friday nights on your own
you will keep texting the dead boy. you will keep expecting him to reply
you’re not suicidal but you’ve started crossing roads with your eyes closed
you were going to take your driving test this year. you will never ever drive again.
you keep having these thoughts like if i ever write a book, i’ll dedicate it to you as if he’s there to hear them. as if a book dedication takes away from the fact that he is ashes now
the boy who you would’ve spent a life with dies on a sunday and you never even get to tell him that you love him. your therapist tells you that you cannot blame yourself and yet it’s all you do: sit and rot in this bed that you made years ago. she tells you that there are five stages of grief. she tells you that you must still be in denial — hasn’t it been too long? — because you still wince when his name comes up in the same sentence as car crash, or tragic, or dead. and he is dead, and you know that, but you weren’t there and you haven’t seen his body and it’s just really fucking difficult to process the death of someone more full of life than any other person that you’ve ever known. you think of the zipline that he built in your garden. you think of his laugh when he landed on the ground. you think of his hair, and his eyes, and his hands on the harness — blonde, blue, beautiful — and you cannot put the pieces together. you cannot associate the boy in the coffin with the boy in the treehouse. he has to be above-ground. he’s the sunrise. and you know this, because of the way the room suffuses with light when he so much as smiles.
dead. your mum tells you to write a card for his family and you cannot yet even go as far as that. you read the news articles and you do not cry, even when his name is released. even when his photo is on the front page of the BBC website. he is your friend, and your mum sits you down and says do you think you’ll come to the funeral? and you can only really picture the layout of his room. bed in one corner. desk by the window. chest of drawers. you remember the day he showed you something cool that he got for his birthday, but the image is blurry and all you can really properly picture is the way his hair looked in the sunlight. glowing, like he did. talking about him in the past tense makes you feel sick.
someone pats you on the back and says everything happens for a reason and you almost spin around and punch them in the jaw. you imagine the crack of bone, the crush of windpipe. you do not think about a car crash. you do not think about the slam of brakes, and the screech of tires, and the boy with the blonde hair bleeding out on the roadside. you are told days later that someone gave him CPR at the scene, and very suddenly all at once you need to sit down. you think of the way his body would jerk with each press of ribs. you try not to wonder whether or not he would have felt the pain of the action. he is not dead. blonde boy, blue eyes, hospital bed. you tell your therapist that you don’t want to kill yourself, but you’ve started crossing roads with your eyes closed and you’re not sure why.
you see a ford fiesta in the street and you’re sick on the pavement. your friends ask all the wrong questions, and you shake your head no to all of them, you’re fine, it was food poisoning. you follow them to the co-op and get a bottle of water. it burns your throat when you drink it. he is not dead, but you wonder if he would’ve lived if you had just been there to walk him home that day. a school of two thousand kids and he was one of three to die in a car crash. (he is not dead. you say this out loud, and it sounds upside-down in the silence. the word denial slides into vision: dark. harder to read than before.) you keep texting the dead boy. he keeps refusing to reply.
you learn on a tuesday that the blonde boy with the biggest heart in the world is going to be cremated. you come close to breaking down right there at the dinner table because you at least thought that you would get to see him one last time: the sun incarnate. you had this image of pressing fingers to cold cheek, to soft hair, to wrist. pulseless. you had this idea, for whatever reason, that you would get to say goodbye to a body before its bones were ground to dust. (cut to dark-blonde girl and light-blonde corpse and darkness. she holds him to her chest as if this is enough to save him: she whispers i love you as if he is still alive to hear it.) you will never get this chance. he will be ash the next time you see him. there is no escaping this.
you are told that his family donated his organs and there is something about the sentiment which carves a hole into your ribs and rots there. the ventricles in his heart went to two little babies, are the exact words, and maybe the one kindness that this situation will ever get to offer is this: that he got to save people. so many lives. that the most incredible heart in the entire world will get to live on for just a little while longer. blonde boy. blue eyes. beating heart. these truths can all keep existing if you only let them. You are allowed to talk about him in the present tense if it brings you comfort: he is beautiful. He is sunlight. He was kind.
on love. and loving the boy who died
if you loved him less, you might have been able to talk about it more
i love you and i’m sorry that it wasn’t enough to save you. i love you and i’m sorry that we didn’t have more time
when you fall asleep it’s all you can see: blue eyes. dead body. he screams, and screams, cries out until you wake up sweating, begs and begs for you to come and save him. you were not there. he died and you weren’t even in the county. you were not there but you could’ve been. you were not there and he died and you didn’t save him. how could it have happened any other way?
when you see the dead boy you see him through smoke. his voice is muffled and his smile is smudged and you’ve already forgotten the cadence of his laugh. have you? already? he wakes you screaming every night and you know that this is for a reason but you do not know why. you love him. you loved him. does the love die just because he did? you keep writing about the corpse and the corpse stays dead: ashes now. dust to dust. you’ll never see his face again.
i love you. i love you. i love you. is that okay? is that too much? would it have been enough to save you?
i burst into tears in front of my therapist. you’d have laughed in my face if you knew. i miss you so much. you were only sixteen. I’ll celebrate every birthday for you. im sorry that i took the treehouse down and im sorry that i went to boarding school and im sorry that you couldn’t come with me. I’m so sorry that we didn’t talk for so long: that was my fault. I missed you all the time. i still do. i wanted to marry you for the longest time. did you know that? i thought you hung the moon
i carved your name into the treehouse roof. i miss you and i love you and i hope you knew
list of things i remember about you
your favourite band is mumford + sons
you support middlesborough fc.
we’ve been friends since we were nine years old
we built a zipline in my back garden and a campfire in yours
you have the best laugh in the entire world
your favourite show is come fly with me. every time taaj comes on you start laughing before he’s even said anything because you love his character so much
your favourite sweets are squashies and you want to be an architect
you love marvellous creations as well. and crunchies. we go to the coop together all the time
i took my first ever bus with you. to stratford, to the cinema. we went to watch spider-man and we snuck a bunch of snacks in from the poundland down the road. i miss you
blonde hair. blue eyes. i remember your smile better than anything else
the layout of your room. you moved rooms a few years back, from the darker room with the bed on the right and the desk on the left to the bigger room, the better one, with the chest of drawers by the doors and the window looking out on the garden and the desk by that window and your huge bed in the corner. i miss it. i remember the way your pillows smelled
you always skip a little bit as you walk when you’re happy. you’re a cat person but you love messing around with bailey regardless. you’re a good person, is the thing. you love everything and the love is returned
i love you beyond words
we used to go swimming every thursday. we used to spend hours throwing your little nokia around, the yellow one, seeing if it would ever break. (it never did).
you love the horses in the paddock two fields away. you like to talk to them, and to feed them the good grass, and to take selfies with them in the sunlight
we used to play COD on my xbox but we’d have to lie every time and say that we were actually playing Forza because our parents didn’t like gun games. we played against the shittest level of bots because we were terrible. it was perfect
we also used to play that James Bond game on your xbox. and we’d play fortnite together: i think we only won once. but it was the loveliest day
my mum baked you raisin oatmeal cookies when we first came round to your house. they were fucking terrible. we laugh about it, seven years later, all the time.
you were the sun
i thought you hung the moon
you love the zipline at the rec even though it’s a bit of a shit one. you were in my tutor group at school and you were far better at maths than i ever was.
we used to spend hours and hours in the barn. you could hardly ever sit still, but we loved it anyway. we’d play pool, and we’d eat our food, and we’d watch all of the shittiest films on the catalogue.
you’re beautiful. i miss your laugh
you used to love sticking your head into that sinkhole that appeared in your driveway
you used to always wear crocs. and you had a shoehorn for your stiffer school shoes for ages because they were so difficult to put on
we roasted marshmallows over the fire in your garden
you came over to my house for fireworks one year.
you died on a sunday
we watched all of brooklyn nine-nine together. i would wait weeks after the new seasons came out just so that i could watch them with you
the crocs were red
every time i walk past your house i wonder if you’re in there looking out at me. i’m going to have the same thought for as long as i live in chipping campden. i haven’t processed your death and i’m not sure i ever will. i can’t go home
i remember the little sheep structure that you made to raise money. i remember the first fifty pence coin that you got for it. you spent it on a freddo in the one-stop and you were so happy
we used to make fun of the meanest boys at school. i don’t even recall their names now. it meant the world to me that you wanted to be my friend and not theirs
funeral day
you wake half an hour before your alarm for no good reason. pit in your stomach. knot in your chest. there’s schoolwork to be done, and you do it, pen to page in the dawn light. you get up. you get dressed. you do not think about the boy in the casket. the bath is still full, water not drained, reflection blurry as you stare down into it. cold water. blue water. you wash your hands, your face, slide your rings on. step by step, like you’ve never actually done this before. one thing after another: you will get through this day if it kills you. terrible choice of words.
you go upstairs and the air is quiet but your mum has plated you eggs and soldiers for breakfast, on your favourite plate: the kind of day which calls for it, she says, but you do not look at her. hateful, awful day. your dad is still asleep and you leave for school with a sour taste in your mouth. same steps as always. one thing after another.
you go to your first lesson. you do the work. your teacher keeps asking if you can speak up, so you do, and you take the notes and make the annotations and you breathe through a poem with so much death at its heart that it almost knocks you flat.
you come home and the air is quieter still, and your bag is packed and your shoes are on and there are a set of painkillers on the table. your brother sends you a message saying are you going to the funeral and you have to stop and breathe for a few seconds. you reply: i think so. are you?
you touch his coffin. your brother holds you as you cry into his suit. he cries too. it is the worst thing you have ever done and you don’t have it in you to elaborate: now or ever. it’s an awful day. your days will be coloured with this grief for as long as you live
sam crying. i know a boy who has my eyes. big man. josh crying. dad crying. stan crying as he walked out. kate and dave walking out holding each other. they kiss frank’s coffin. the killers and tom odell and rocket man. you stand for the entire thing and cry for the entire thing. dave cries as he gives his speech. you will never recover from this ache
monday april 24
The door opens and there is your brother. It is a Monday, and it is raining, and you are shaking like a dog. His mask slips for just a moment, and you see the pity in his eyes as he takes you in, and you understand it too much to resent the sentiment. The rain is beating down and you are drenched to your core. Your hair sticks to your cheeks, and your ears, and your neck, and your clothes hang so heavy on your limbs that they might just pull you down entirely. He says something about how you’re soaking wet and you don’t hear it, not really. You pitch forward and his arms are around you and he doesn’t even care that you’re messing up his shirt. He is warm, and he is gentle, and he is home. He is alive: you will never take this for granted again. He’s in a white shirt and a brown coat and he holds you for longer than you deserve, and you don’t cry, but you want to. You know that he would not flinch if you did.
Here is the situation: the door opens to a girl in the rain. This is not a happy story. The door opens to a girl in the rain and she has been crying, you can see it written into her eyelashes, and she is shivering in the cold and she doesn’t even seem to notice that. The girl in the rain was told yesterday that her next door neighbour was in a car accident. He is (was) her age — almost. They share a year group but she is already seventeen and he will never get to be. Her friend is dead and she was told this yesterday and here she is, in someone’s doorway, dripping rainwater and shaking from the cold. It is only April. The showers have not stopped yet. Her brother takes her into his arms and he does not understand why she looks so beaten down — he knows of the friend, and he knows of the death, but he does not know that she walked an hour home from a therapy session instead of just getting the fucking tube. She is miserable. She does not remember the day — she does not remember the walk. She woke up, this morning, and time had not stopped so she went into school. Now she is here. A day has passed but not really. She cannot breathe. Her brother holds her, and holds her, and holds her, and she thanks a non-existent god that he is here because twice today she has walked into the road with her eyes closed. Nothing came. Nothing came.
the step into the road is a revolution. your eyes are shut but you can hear, you can hear, and the tire-screech noise sounds almost like some special effect. not your life. not this life. just some movie. but it isn’t, it’s real this time, and you sort of just think oh, right, I’m going to die now, and then you do.
it isn’t instant. you knew it wouldn’t be but it still comes as a bit of a shock — the blood-to-the-head taste of metal in your mouth, the feel of your own body against the tarmac, the slight sting in your palms and the dull ache which speaks of two broken legs. the pain is what knocks you out, probably, and it’s weird that you don’t even really feel that part but you do latch on to the sound of your heartbeat slowing. there’s screaming and it isn’t yours. you die before the weight of this selfishness has the chance to make you cry.
/
there is no resurrection. do you understand that? you are a girl, not a god, and you were hit by a mercedes going at least fifty miles an hour. the paramedics do try to restart your heart but it doesn’t work. it doesn’t work. there is no resurrection. there’s screaming and it isn’t yours.
/
death is like this: thoughts and no answer. a loop and a line all at once, turbulent like nausea but not like a plane in a storm. death is like this: thoughts and no answer. lots of thoughts and none at all, and a name you don’t recognise until you do. death is like pins and needles all over and it is not a nice feeling, but then again it wouldn’t be. rational thinking feels like a strange course of action, mostly because you’re dead and you’re an atheist so your whole entire worldview has just been torn in two, because your heart has stopped beating so really the fact of thinking in the first place feels like swimming too deep in a pool. not everything feels like something else. you say death is like pins and needles but it isn’t, not actually, because death is something wholly separate from concepts like depth or water. or maybe it isn’t. maybe you’ve been swimming all your life. maybe this monologue is becoming far too philosophical on account of the silence of your pulse in the darkness.
/
is it dark? it’s black like you’ve never seen it, black interspersed with so many colours that it actually technically can’t be black, but the colours here aren’t shades that you’ve ever seen before and you wonder very suddenly if you’ve been reincarnated as one of those shrimp which have twelve colour cone photoreceptors as opposed to humans who only have three.
/
you see a boy. beneath a tree. it’s a willow tree and you know this even without seeing it because he’s lying there sweet as anything in the shade, and you think, you think, you think—
/
blonde hair blue eyes. beautiful boy. you think, afterlife, and the word doesn’t quite fit into your mouth when you try and say it so when you spit the letters out they just sound like hello. the sky is too pink to be real and the grass is unthinkingly soft as you take a step and for a second you’re not even thinking about the dead boy beneath the willow. you think instead of the wasps in the clover. you think instead of his feet on the ground.
/
you’re alive, you say, and it sounds wrong just to murmur the words. he isn’t. he hasn’t been for months. he peers up at you through the fringe he lost and you almost fall over. afterlife. all at once this is exactly how you pictured it and nothing at all like how you imagined this would be. because this is death, and because death is freedom, and because nobody will ever hear your voice again, you tell him the truth. the truths. one: you’re dead. did you know that? two: you died in a car crash on the twenty-third of april. three: you were sixteen.
/
the boy, fractal-carved, does not react to any of this, except to say i know.
/
i know, i know, i know. he is not shocked, and he is not seventeen, and you know that. and so does he.
/
I couldn’t stop writing about you. i forgot how your laugh sounded. your mum deleted your snapchat account. i talked to you every day. not to you, really, more at you. at your name. you were cremated. somebody gave you CPR on the roadside. you were taken to the hospital in an air ambulance like the one we saw on the field outside of my house that one time. do you remember that? do you remember it? do you remember me? I couldn’t stop writing about you. your mum is okay but not really. i haven’t heard from your dad. you died in a ford fiesta. the other car was a fiat 500. somebody told me the colours of both cars but i’ve forgotten them now. i missed you so much. i love you and i never told you. i never told you. i love you so much. i love you so much and i’ve never eaten a squashie again. my mum wrote your name in the sand on your birthday. i thought time was going to stop when you died but it didn’t. i thought i was going to die the day after you did but i didn’t. lois was the one who told me. it was a sunday and i was eating dinner and she sent me a message on snapchat saying did you hear what happened to frank wormald and i said no, what’s happened, is he okay, and then i pressed on her story and it was a picture of her holding some flowers and there was a dove emoji and a heart emoji and i though oh my god something really bad has happened to him, and then i told myself not to be so pessimistic and dramatic but then she replied and you were in a car accident and you were dead. you were alive until that moment. i love you so much. i never told you. i couldn’t stop writing about you. i think that was the guilt.
/
the words are hurled from you, ripped from you, and because this is the afterlife and because there is a dead boy breathing in front of you, it makes more sense than anything else that you can see them as they spin from your mouth. they’re lit like prisms in the sunlight, rainbows carving from them in lines which keep shattering into the both of you, breaking like waves against his shins, against his wrists, against his lips. by the time you finish speaking you’re on your knees, doubled over, gasping for air. you love him. you love him and you’ve told him. you love him and you’ve told him. you start to cry so hard that you can feel your ribs turning blue through the fabric of your shirt.
Life is beautiful and love is everywhere and so are you. The shooting star in Cornwall. The rainbow before school. The Peter Pan statue. The couple on the train. I see you in everything and I know that for every one person that dies, two are born: who did you become? I hope the lives are good. There was enough love in you for two people — enough for ten, actually. Hundreds. Thousands. A boy in a blue jacket runs past me on the platform and I think of you. I find a rose on the tube windowsill on my way to Katya’s and I think of you. I think of you all the time, actually. On the bad days that’s shit. On the good days it’s what keeps me alive. I love you more than I’ll ever be able to express, in words, or in art, or in sprinting full speed around my neighbourhood soaking wet at one in the morning: I don’t believe in the afterlife but I believe in you. If I never stop saying your name then you never die. Not really. If I spend the rest of my life seeing you in every good thing then you live forever. You were beautiful, Frank. You still are.
On bad days it’s like this: we travel west for the winter. Like birds. A migration of motor rather than wing, tyres rumbling over the tarmac, concrete morphing into treeline as we scrape further away from London on the map. The car is quiet. It’s a journey to you, Frank. To the town where I left you. To the town that you died in. We pass the junction where your car crashed and I hold my breath for the full two minutes until we turn onto the next road. There’s still a gap in the hedge where you hit it. Like the leaves just refuse to grow back. Like the damage done is irreparable — which it is. Because a boy is dead, and the boy is you, and I have to drive past your car-crash-hedge-gap every time I come back to this awful town. It wasn’t awful until you died in it. It was a good place. It had you.
On the bad days it’s like this: the sun lights the trees in this shining orange and I think, oh, you. I think of you and it sucks. I think of you and there’s no way to romanticise your absence: not when I’m here. Not when I’m still your next door neighbour, and you’re still dead. I haven’t seen your mum since you died, and I’m really sorry. I don’t think I could handle it. Your dad hasn’t put up Christmas lights this year. Frank — can you hear me? I’m praying to you. I don’t pray. I don’t believe in ghosts. Your dad hasn’t put up Christmas lights. He always puts up Christmas lights. It’s a town in-joke, his architecture, the way it’s something new each time — last year it was the word naughty and then the word nice flashing one then the other, the year before that it was five circles for five golden rings, the year before that is was Prosec-Ho-Ho-Ho. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. They aren’t up this year. I walk past your house for the first time since you died and there aren’t any lights up on the garage wall. You stupid boy, they loved you so much. There aren’t any lights up. The lights are gone.
On the bad days it’s like this: you’re fucking everywhere. The town seethes of you. You know I have to walk past your house every time I go to the co-op? And I always used to love it, always used to wonder if you were in there looking out at me, always used to put on my nice jeans just in case you caught sight of me that day. Because it was always a possibility — that you were in there. In the office. In your old bedroom. That you could see me walking by. And I loved that possibility: because I never knew, never knew for sure, never could be certain whether you’d seen me that day. Except now I do. You’re dead, and I still have to walk past your house. You’re dead and I still wonder each time whether you’re in there looking out at me. You’re dead. The lights aren’t up this year. There are no lights and there is no you. I have to walk past your house every time I go to the co-op. There are no lights, and there is no you. I walk past a house. It belongs to my next door neighbour. It belonged to you.
I don’t know how to write about you with any sort of eloquence. I repeat sentences. I snap them short. I repeat sentences. You’re just dead, just gone, and there’s no fancy writing style that I can dredge up to properly capture that. You’re dead. That’s the news. That’s all I can write about. Everything comes back to you — beautiful boy. Blonde boy. You’re the sun and the moon and the whole wide world, and your laughter over the phone used to make my day, and leaving you here was the worst decision I’ve ever made. And you’re dead. It’s like a suffix, now. The fact is attached to everything I ever knew about you: kind, fast, golden, dead. Architect, baker, comedian, dead. Oh, Jesus, I loved you to the furthest star. Blonde boy. Dead boy. You’re shackled to it. So am I. Listen — I don’t believe in ghosts but I do think that you’re haunting this place. This town blanched spectral with the shudder of you.
Onto the town: onto the town. The town which breathes of you in every exhale. You’re all over my driveway, on your bike, in the snow, skidding and crashing deliberately so that I could film you and make £250 from sending your fail video to You’ve Been Framed. You’re in my bedroom, snapping glowsticks, giving me that starfish necklace, going through our old yearbook and laughing at how we used to do our hair. You’re down the drive, racing ahead of me, skipping along, balancing arms-out along the wall. You’re at the top of every hill, in the field with the horses, pressed into the sweetshop corner of the co-op with a shining silver fifty pence coin held warm to the skin of your palm — I can’t escape you and I’m worried it’s going to kill me. You’re everywhere, and I hate it, and I love you, and you’re my next door neighbour and I still haven’t yet found the words to carve that fact into the past tense. I loved you. I went to your funeral. You died in a car crash in April and you are no longer my next-door neighbour. Except, your ashes are. The truth of it hurts my teeth.
I forget how bad it is just to be here — just to be around the air in your absence. I walk past your house and it’s like taking a bat to the ribs, and most days I forget how to breathe under the weight of just living next to you. A Frank-less home. I don’t believe in ghosts but I believe in you. I can’t even talk about the garden yet, man. The treehouse, the river, the grass. The garden is as much a eulogy as the ones your parents gave: it’s all you. It’s always you. You’re all I know, and you’re all I’ve known, and you’ll be written into every molecule of this town for as long as I live. You’re everything I see, and everything I do, and all the air that I breathe in this place. The Christmas lights are gone from your driveway. So are you. So are you. So are you.
i dream of your mother. i dream of her smile. the sheen of grief to her lips is potent, shadow-cold, hideous as a tombstone. her eyes are so kind. she was my family too. i’m so sorry. i’m so sorry. in the dream i don’t tell anyone, her hair is dyed purple again like it was when we were kids. her face is the same, her mouth is the same. she holds out a middlesborough football shirt to me but the fabric is frozen, in ice, in time, and it splinters like bone the minute i take hold.
i tell her that it’s my fault you died, and i say the words in another language, because maybe this is only real if she can understand it. maybe this is all a little more bearable if I can just figure out how to shoulder the grief on my own.
i dream of your mother. i dream of her face when i give her the news. your son is dead, your son is dead, your son is dead. i am a police officer and i am in the yellow vest and it’s raining, hard. it’s my fault that he died. i am a police officer in the cotswolds — i don’t know a word of any other language than this one. so i say the words in english and she believes me this time, purple hair flaming as she beats the life out of me. only dead do i stop apologising. and even then. even then.
i find so many words for son that my teeth start to fall out. most potently: your boy. your best friend. bodies strewn on the roadside like junkyard dogs. can you picture it? she was my family too. oh god, she was my family too.
i dream of your mother. she is a lioness with violet fur and she tears the heart from my chest the moment she sees me. i wake up and your corpse is beneath my bed, flowers growing from the cracks in your ribs, and i am paralysed for two hours until i remember how they burned you. ashes in a box cannot hurt me. if only, if only. you’re always a zombie in my nightmares even though they incinerated your decaying flesh. i worry more about waking up from the horrors than i do falling asleep into them because at least in the dreams you’re still a body, still a body, still a boy.
I hold your rotten figure and it aches. it’s agony. it’s all i know.
i dream of your mother. she is in the pool with us and i’m throwing plastic forks at you and the water is an oil spill around our bodies. your eyes are shining with an emotion I don’t understand and then you reach through the ink and wrap your hands around my throat and I let it happen. your mother says your name for the first time since the accident, and you stop, but barely. your fingerprints lace in a bruise across my neck and all of a sudden the bruise is all I have left of you. I dream of your mother and i working to tattoo the mark to my skin, racing as it fades, memorialising your violence as though it was something beautiful. (it was.) the tattoo burns every time i take a breath, and i savour the pulse, the warmth, the life of it, because it’s you, it’s you, it’s you.
when i wake up for the second time, i’m in your bed. the old one. the single bed, raised above the floor, blue sheets, red sheets. the room smells like you. this i do remember. the darkness, the scent of it. and then i blink and it’s your mother, standing in your childhood bedroom, her hair greyer than i’ve ever seen it. this is a dream, she says first, and i know that, i do. but i’m in your bed. frank is gone, she says next. he’s gone, sweetheart. she doesn’t call me that. i think. i don’t remember her names for me but i remember how your bedroom smelled. the sight of your cat in the red-blue bedsheets. we can’t get him back.
i wake up for a third time. i’m in my bed. the room doesn’t smell like you, and your mother is a hundred miles away, and your ashes are too. the heartbeat in my ears tells me that this one is the real world, that i won’t find your rotting bones beneath my mattress when i bend to look for them. i’ll reach out anyway. i’ll claw at the floorboards until the bleeding starts. your mother is gone — and so are you. so are you. so are you.
about me. a poem
i am eighteen. i am also twelve and i am also seven.
i am holding hands with my friend evie at the bottom of the pool.
see? we’re seven. we’re the only ones here. our hands are so small.
i am holding hands at seven underwater
and evie’s palm is warm but her fingers are cool,
and we can both open our eyes underwater so we do, we do,
i don’t remember her eye colour but i remember the way her gap-tooth smile looked through the blue.
it’s like we are in space. i am in space. we are the world’s youngest astronauts
and when she kicks up from the tiles in the deep end, i watch her go.
she gets real small, and the sunlight sprinkles down around her like she’s a mermaid,
so i surface too and we’re astronauts, we’re mermaids, we’re seven, we have so much time.
i am interested in the syntax of telling people that i am eighteen.
in any other language you would say that you have eighteen years, like holes in a belt,
eighteen years which you carry with you in a little suitcase. you have them. they are yours.
i am eighteen. i do not own the years: they are stapled to me, like a face, like a name.
to be something. there is an element of helplessness in the english language:
you are eighteen. the rest of the years are gone. you do not have them. you do not have a choice in this.
i keep a photo of a dead boy in my wallet. his eyes were blue
but you can’t see that in the photo, just like you can’t see that he is dead, and ashes,
and he was thirteen in the photo and sixteen when he died.
i swallow down the english language and how it hates us, how it haunt us.
he is trapped in the past tense, i am trapped in eighteen.
he was sixteen. was beautiful. was alive.
the dogon people refer to their dead in the present,
as existing, as beating hearts and moving blood. a language exists
where the dead do not die — but not this one. i am a writer, not a warlock.
i can write him into the present tense but i cannot bring him back from the dead.
i keep a photo of a blonde boy in my wallet. i’m alive. i’m alive. i’m alive.
Things that you remember about a funeral
It will be the worst day of your life
It will be the worst day of your life
There is no end. To the misery. Look me in the eyes when I say this. It will be the worst day of your life.
A year later a girl will lie across from you in a bed and tell you that she didn’t used to be able to sleep without the sound of you typing on your laptop late into the night. I would go home for the holidays, she says, and you weren’t there.
You will think back to the funeral. You will think back to the gut-hollowing feeling of reaching to your left to hold his hand and remembering that yes, yes, this is the worst day of your life. You feel the absence like a heartbeat. There is no hand. He is not there.
You look around in this crowd of people who you once went to school with and you realise that you don’t know a single soul. You did. He helped. You keep looking for him in this crowd out of habit alone and each time it’s like being stabbed. Mostly because you keep finding him. Flashes of blonde, flashes of blue, and you think, it’s you, it’s you, I knew it would be you,
In my dreams you are alive. In my dreams I answer a cold call one day and it’s your voice down the line saying I’m here, I’m here, you missed me and I was gone for so long but I’m here now. In my dreams you are alive and running towards me on the train platform, and I collide so hard with your warm body that it knocks us both over. I thread my hand through your hair and it’s as soft as I remember, and we have a train to catch but that very quickly stops mattering once we’re pacing it away from the station towards the comfort of your house. In my dreams we spend two weeks straight playing all of your Xbox games to completion and I let you have the remote the entire time, because it’s enough to just watch you moving, watch your thumbs on the joysticks, watch the movement of your hands and taste the air which says, over and over again, you are not missing from me anymore. In my dreams you have a pulse and a body. In my dreams you are alive. I answer a cold call and I come home to you. In my dreams you come to London with me, and it isn’t too late, and we sit on the top deck of a double-decker bus and it’s a dream so there isn’t a roof and you stand in your seat, yelling with joy, arms up, blonde hair flipped backwards and streaming in the wind. I love you. That’s not the dream. I love you so much. In my dreams it’s your voice down the line and you say I was gone but I’m here now but I’m not listening because I’m too busy falling down the lane towards your house, barrelling through the front door, collapsing into you on your carpeted stairwell and pressing both hands to the space on your chest where I can feel a heartbeat. These are the dreams. These are the facts. I wake up every time and you are dead dead gone but I love you like I love the sunrise and I love you like I love coming back from the dead and I love you like I love waking up whenever I want to in the summer holidays and we watched Suits together and I love you and in my dreams I answer a cold call and it’s your voice down the line. In my dreams your body is warm. I don’t ever know what to do with that. You don’t have a body anymore. I would kiss you on the mouth if you asked me to. I would do anything. Come back. Come back. Break the bones in my arm or something, get into a fight with me, call me a name that we can’t reconcile with all of the months between us. It doesn’t have to be good or nice or kind. As long as you’re alive you could ruin my life in return, I don’t mind. I really don’t. Do something terrible. I will forgive you. I will watch you play Xbox until our eyes are bloodshot from the TV strain. Call me. I will pick up. I love you and I want you home. There are no conditions. Burn the house down with me inside it, reverse time, put me in the footwell of your stupid speeding car. It really doesn’t matter. I will swallow anything you feed me as long as your hands are warm.
