I whispered

I’m at the Hungarian Pastry shop. It’s October 30th 2022 and it’s 6:57 PM and I’m writing a midterm response about City of God by St. Augustine and a man just walked through the center of the cafe wearing a gray button down shirt, and blue jeans, and a red t-shirt underneath and glasses that look like yours, a shaved head just like yours, and a nose that looks exactly like yours, and oh my God Mayed, I am genuinely horrified by how much he looks like you. He looks like an aged you. He smiles like you. Oh my God, he smiles like you.

“You look more rested.” That’s what I just heard him say to a friend.

He’s speaking to a table at the far corner of the cafe. I can’t bequeath the thought in my head telling me that this is what you would’ve looked like in a few years time, in your late twenties, when the burden you’re constantly carrying, that you’ve been carrying for your whole life, has lessened and you’re a little happier and you have enough emotional capacity within you and energy to ask other people about how they’re doing, when you’re feeling light enough to see the joy in people’s eyes.

Mayed, I have been seeing so many people who look like you in so many places. And every time I see them, I am fighting back tears. Is that you? Is that you? I am looking at the back of his head now, he has hands in his pocket, I think the guy speaking to him just called him a writer, I remember that you loved to write and I always hated what you wrote because I thought it was a blatant representation of masculinity, devoid of heart. You always told me that you think that I would grow out of being a writer. That this is all a phase and it’s going to pass and reality was going to slap me in the face and I was going to stop being so naive at some point. Mayed, you have never been so wrong about anything in your life. Except for the belief that you so firmly believed that you did not deserve to be alive.

Is that you?

The week after you pass, I suddenly feel the urge to clean out of my closet. The closet I’ve put off organizing for six years. Suddenly, I am folding masses of clothes into donation bags, pieces of paper into piles to be recycled, broken things to be thrown away. I’ve been holding on to too much for far too long. The heaviness of it all piles on my chest and God, I have to get rid of something.

Tonight, I finished Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. What prompted my reading of the book was a little random, a little out of the blue, but certainly predestined (I’ve been thinking that everything is predestined lately). I was at the Barnes and Nobles perpendicular to Union Square Park with Al Reem and some of Didion’s books were showcased on one of those shelves with titles designed to allure buyers. Something like Buy 1 Get 1 Free or On Sale or Recommended or something like that. The exact title escapes me but I remember mentioning to Al Reem that I started to read Didion over the summer. Finally, I think I add. Reading Didion felt like a necessary practice to do as a writer.

She talks about Didion and brings up Year of Magical Thinking. It’s a book she wrote about her husband passing away, Al Reem explains further. I think I should read it, I add, and I watch how Al Reem’s eyes slightly widen, like she had just realized something. She affirms what I say nonverbally and we don’t hone in what I said or on the book any further. I don’t want to hone in any further. I too am a little shocked. Why do Al Reem’s eyes widen? Didn’t everyone think of me when they say the words death/die/ funeral/sibling/suicide/passing/etc. Etc. etc. Am I the only one who thinks about myself and my world and my life and my brother and my family when any of those words emerge whether verbally or visually in some way? Couldn’t everyone see the remnants of mortality on my body?

Anyway, I think I buy A Year of Magical Thinking within the next few days—it could’ve been the very next day, but my memory fails me once again—because I feel a sense of urgency towards it. Didion writes of this urgency too in her book. I feel a sense of urgency as I write this too. I feel uneasy and queasy as I type, like there’s something looming in the distance that is begging me to write this. I realize that what is looming before me is time. And the threat that, with time, I will forget all of these things that I am feeling. All of the things that your death is a part of, Mayed. I don’t want to forget any of it. Not the books I read or the crying I do or the pain I feel or the loneliness of it or the exact position I am in—cross-legged on a single seater couch at the Four Seasons in Washing D.C. in room 474 at 11:44 PM on Sunday, November 6, 2022. I don’t want to forget more of how this all makes me feel. I don’t want to forget.

When I woke up this morning, I swear the first thought that crossed my mind was that I needed to finish A Year of Magical Thinking today. The urgency looms and propels me to finish. Begs me to finish. And so I do, at 9:50 PM at the only opened cafe in Georgetown this Sunday evening. Kenza is seated opposite me, fingers rapidly scrolling through her phone, freshly seated after a long forty-minute walk throughout the city.

I’ve been taking photos of different excerpts of the book throughout my reading of it with the intention of sharing them on Instagram. After finishing the book and making it back to the hotel, I sit down on one of the couches tucked away in the floor beneath the hotel lobby and draft the post, write the caption, and post it. For a brief, temporary movement, my declaration of grief is on social media. After Walker Harris, a friend I’ve made through Kenza who’s currently at NYU, messages me about his perspective that we’ve overcorrected the privacy/repression of grief with oversharing, I delete the story and the post. I feel lonely all over again. And I’m sitting here again with the question: will sharing my grief on social media exude a sense of frivolity? Is there virtue in privacy? Is grief more real when I keep it to myself?

I want to bring this up to Haman but I feel embarrassed talking about it. I am also tired and kind of delirious. God, I don’t even know anymore. I don’t want to weigh anyone down. But I want to shamelessly express my grief. But I don’t want my grief to be all that I am. But lately, that has been the case and no one can see it but me. How do I tell others to understand that I can only be half of who I am now because one half of me is wholly dedicated to mourning? I wish the people around me would be more understanding of my slip-ups but the only way to do it is to explain that mourning has crazy impacts on you and that you’re going to be a terrible friend for a while because all you think about is self-pity.

In the end of this, all I feel is urgency. I am literally shaking with urgency as I write this. Shaking. My mind and my questions feel as unresolved as ever but I do not have the patience to decipher them. Only urgency my dad adds my dead brother to the groupchat whatsapp buzzing on a phone no longer connected body no longer there boy forever missing baba makes groupchats like i make promises and brother is in every one of them but no one can find his phone lost like him like everything i know about him buzz buzz buzzzzzzzzzzzzzz in the underworld in the aboveground somewhere that is not here boy forever missing dead brother in groupchats he did not ask to be in knowing you, brother, you’d leave each gc the second you were added you hated the buzz of the telephone unnecessary convos hated everything dead brother groupchat baba whizzing and burrrrrrr baba’s life has always been about loss one yearbefore dead brother dies, i don’t speak to baba for a year. i punish him for loving me, and he never forces me to speak today, baba sends me a whatsapp message asking me if he can call i tell him he can call me without asking he always asks whatsapp is a gateway to daughters who don’t speak and sons who die baba makes groupchats searching for love