Elegy of the Living Dead

“I’m left alone with my mind in which uncertainty dwells and despair makes its home.”

And it’s the grief of losing this mind, and realising how long I unknowingly watched it happen, made me halt at every word . Walking into the derelict room, I saw her unsharpened self staring at the static of the TV. Her heart lay open on the table. In the torn pages beside it, in the faint sentences broke off into white space. The figs lay on the table, rotting away. The warmth of the sun never reached her eyes, nor the touch of people. The room stayed cold and grey like a mortuary, scraps of the vivid wallpaper falling off the grey wall. I stared at the ghost of the living dead and mourned the loss of someone I knew with my eyes closed; even in my deepest slumber, I would still dream of her, now sitting in front of me like an ephemeral soul.

The opaque, glassy eyes were once passages to the glee of a child, eyes that would squint with laughter, revealing bitty pearls that added just another glimmer to the strange face. The arms, painted with yellow and green and pink, now stayed mapped with ridged lines of despair and unstretched hands. What once displayed the weekly obsession now remained chipped short, brimmed with red, familiar to the blooming of crimson stripes on wavering legs.

The dried paint, the unfinished words, the stopped clock made my heart ache. The passing of time was just the passing of someone I never realized I was losing until the clock stopped. Even my arms wrapped around her didn’t ease my heart; I wonder what would ease hers then. You could only see the red question mark on the page, an accusatory invitation forcing you to read the blanks, which said everything.

The blank notebook stared at me like an unsettling view. The faltered words of the year-old, empty notebook saw the slow fraying of the threads that once bound us without effort, and I felt the need to quilt a warm cover to support the ghost of whom I loved. The shadows of the mind dwelled in the pale hollows of the cheeks, in the collarbones, and I wished I could serve the delicacy of life to give her something that would stay.

Now no praise of love that arrived with receipts kept her warm; even the depths of hell couldn’t warm the house, which froze like a stain in time. The pictures hung on the wall behind layers of dust and intricacies of cobwebs. The albums stayed pushed deep into the corner, mocking the force that drove her upward, only to cast her inward, where she never rose again. 

Even the dead found more comfort in death than the living dead, and I wish I could hold her for the last time before the tides took her away. I wish I could pull the hands of the clock backward, so my hands might reach hers. I wish I could hand her voice a pen. I wish I could embrace her for the last time, and it might—this might—have stayed at the shore. I wish I could have given her love that had no place left to go, that was everywhere. And I only wished, while I stayed there, holding her.