SATURDAY
05 OCTOBER, 1996
ISAIAH

               How many times do I have to kill you before you stop coming back? I've been trying to bury you for six years and just when I think I've managed, just when the only living reminder of you are the phantom pains in my now-hollow ribcage, you cram soil in my mouth.

I buried you not six feet into the dirt, but ten, twenty even, and still you crawl out of that grave. I could chain you to the core of the Earth and it wouldn't keep you.

Even now, all I think about is you.

Even now, as I belt my jeans before he gets the condom off.

All I'd like is to leave before he has the chance to speak but I'd like to wash my hands first and he's standing in the way. That's not his name but it's what I've called him in my head. Daniel: God is my judgement. Feels fitting.

I always choose Torahic names. Maybe it was funny at first.

Just as I won't accept his, I won't give him mine. Isaiah, God is my salvation... Might as well tell him plainly that my mother bargained back her place in the Garden by offering up mine, I know nothing about my father, and I've long since become comfortable with the fact I'll spend eternity in Gehinnom.

I won't ask him to disagree, to attempt to hack through the vines of shame that strangle my skeleton like ancient ruins — simultaneously a cage and scaffolding, sever one and I can't promise it won't collapse. It takes delicate skill to weed shame without untethering my bones. We all know you were the only person capable of that.

Besides, judging by his earlier comments, Daniel isn't the kind to disagree if I brought up Hell. If he did, we wouldn't be in this toilet together.

The hypothesis is proven immediately when he drops the condom into the rubbish bin and glances at me with a glint in his eye. 'What's your boyfriend gonna think?'

'He ain't my boyfriend.'

His mouth twitches. He doesn't believe me.

Is he more homophobic than I expected or do we still look like lovers? How can a stranger, six years later, take one glance and know the only place I felt at home was beside you?

To defend myself, or maybe because I need to talk to someone and, since he's here and doesn't know my name, I might as well tell him, I divulge a crumb. 'He was my best friend. Long time ago.'

'What, you try to suck his dick and he wasn't into it?'

I smile; simplified to its rudimentary equation, he's not too far off.

I watch him clean himself before he pulls his boxers and joggers up from his ankles. He's fit, objectively speaking, and yet, I struggle to find anything attractive. That'll be Dorian's fault. Just when I started to forget his face enough to fabricate it in others, he decided to remind me, and now, I'm once again reduced to comparing every countenance to his.

Daniel's skin is lighter than Dorian's and nowhere near as smooth. I'm sure he considers moisturiser a threat to his masculinity. His hands, during the brief moment they accidentally slipped under my shirt to cinch my waist, were chilly and clumsy. I haven't looked into his eyes even once but I assume they aren't the kind you gaze into for hours — days, lifetimes!

'Sum like that.'

I move to the basin to wash my hands. Through the mirror, Daniel allows his gaze to saunter over my skin — which is a tawny brown even in October because I wasn't outside enough to get a tan this summer, my round shoulders, and settle on my blouse which was probably intended for women.

'So what, you get fucked by straight bruddas like a bitch? Is that your thing?'

Is that my thing? I don't need men to be gay to fuck me, what I need them to be is merciless. What I need to be is anyone, just a body, "you could be anyone".

'If you want women to be into you, maybe start by not calling em "bitches".' I shake water from my hands, dry the rest on my jeans, and step out of the reflection. 'You can call yourself straight all you like — don't affect me in no way.'

Daniel pulls his hands from his pockets. 'What's that s'posed to mean?' He pushes off the lopsided metal cabinet and steps forward.

I step back with a timid shake of my head. I don't want to turn this into the kind of violence I can't pretend to enjoy.

'Nuttin.'

The word is still on my tongue when he grips my throat. Not hard but the threat is there. I've been in this situation enough times to know that the threat is there. I don't struggle. I don't move at all except to meet his eyes. They really are nothing like Dorian's.

'You tell anyone about this, I'll–'

'–kill me?' I finish. 'Brudda, I don't even know you.'

'You disgust me.'

He lets go and shoves past me. 

I clutch the sink to catch my breath. Daniel probably had no intention of harm but my body's threshold for pain is underground. Gloria by Laura Branigan reverberates through the house foundations. God thinks He's funny.

I don't wait for the pain to ease before I find my way out of the house. I keep my stare fixated on the pavement beyond as I cross the porch — it's the same don't look, don't look, don't look mantra I repeat to myself when I pass the bookshelves in a charity shop, knowing if I do, I'll spend hours browsing poetry I'm not supposed to read anymore.

The night air cleaves at my throat with every inhale. My periphery is still dim and my head swollen. My feet don't quite touch the asphalt but also seem to sink a few centimetres into it. I start to regret parking a good four hundred meters away but when I reach the closed Co-Op car park to find it deserted save for my Ford, relief sets in.

I turn the battery on but not the engine. When I fold the sun visor down, the light beside the mirror illuminates and I angle it to my neck to find foxglove bruises blooming on my skin already. Great, like I don't have work tomorrow. Like my vitiligo doesn't invite enough stares.

I fetch my bundle of tobacco and rolling paper held together by a thinning elastic. Though my fingers — which are always either stiff, shaking, or numb, if not some hellish combination of the three, sometimes featured by prickling or burning too — are anything but dependable, a smoking habit is much cheaper with self-rolled cigarettes. So I've become a connoisseur of perfect rolls even when I have to urge to cut off my fingers because I'm sure it would hurt less.

"Since when do you smoke?" Since when the fuck do you care?

It doesn't take more than a minute for me to have one lit between my lips. I turn on the CD dutifully waiting for me, roll the window down — a symbolic gesture, really, because the stench infested my car years ago — and sink into the seat. My eyes latch onto their own reflection. They're dull. The dark circles are only emphasised by the vitiligo in the inner corners.

It's impressive you recognised me; I wouldn't.

Tears well in my waterlines and I smack the visor up. I can cry but I won't look at myself do it. I outgrew the romanticisation of my own tragic misery when I turned twenty.

Because if you're still miserable at twenty, who can you blame but yourself? The convenience of pinning everything on your mother or your father or your hometown or hormones is gone, nor do you yet have a spouse or children or broken dreams to shove the burden onto. You're an adult with the agency — and therefore, the responsibility — to do something about it. Misery in your twenties is self-inflicted, and how can you romanticise misery that's self-inflicted?

Still, Whitney Houston reels brooks of tears down my cheeks. Wallowing in self-pity is confined to my car and the 68 minutes and 12 seconds of pirated music I burnt on this CD; I don't cry anywhere else and never longer than that.

The worst is that I still miss him. I miss him from the core of my bones.

I miss ridiculous play arguments about whether the correct order is Jewish-Jamaican or Jamaican-Jewish or if Y2K is actually going to happen that would be lost by the first person to smile. I miss being the first person he played his music to — the only person, in his words, he dared to play his music to before it was polished. I miss reading him poetry. I miss reading him my poetry. I miss writing poetry.

A year. He's been back a year.

Why did I let myself envision scenes of cinematic reunions, of one day hearing a knock on my door and opening it to find him rain-soaked on my threshold, of gazing out the window during a lecture to see him beneath it with a blue-lidded plastic container of hamantashen he baked heart-shaped even if it completely contradicts the name of the biscuit?

This was the worst meeting I could've imagined. Since when does Dorian go to parties anyway? Especially on a Saturday. Sure, the sun set hours ago, Sabbath is over, but still. Dorian doesn't go to parties, definitely not on Saturdays. On Saturday evenings, Dorian listens to the recordings he's collected from the week.

Have we been missing each other by seconds between the aisles of Tesco and the main library? Have I walked right past him on the street but just not known to look up? Has he seen me around all the time but chosen to duck and hurry past? I really am nothing to him.

Maybe I should be grateful but all I can muster up in the emptiness within me is a ravenous loathing that Dorian showed me everything I'm doomed to miss out on. Men were much easier to swallow before Dorian. My blood tastes bitter now.

By the time the mix reaches the second pre-chorus of All Cried Out by Allure, my chest is damp from tears. I can't breathe through my sobs and the smoke.

The worst part is that he looked miserable. I'd like nothing more than for him to hurt as much as I do, but if your life didn't get better when you cut me out of it, what did you do it for? If you're still not happy then why the fuck did you leave? We both made it, we're both finishing our master's degrees at Oxford, alone and miserable if your appearance tonight was anything to judge by. What did you do it for?

Despite myself, my palms warm at the image. He still has the same tape recorder. Of course, he does. Dorian doesn't do change unless it's forced on him.

Sure, his hair is different and his body all but unrecognisable: he's never had waves before, his shoulders were broader, clothes filled out in a way impossible for the lanky Dorian who left. But he stands the same, with awful posture and hands at his sides while his eyes scan everything else before they make contact. He still plays the piano on his thighs.

Stop it. I'm not doing this one more fucking time.

I clench my jaw, my tears stop. And I mutate grief into its easier form: anger. This grudge is exhausting to drag with me but if I must drown, I'll choose the goloshes.

I've done everything I can to kill him, and more importantly to kill the stubborn ember of hope that keeps burning, like a tea light, under my heart. Now it's dunked in water and even the most inner chamber of my heart calcifies.

I finish my cigarette and roll up the window. The engine coughs several times before it hacks to a steady rumble.

I lived in on-campus accommodation for my first year but I couldn't hack it. Maybe it's the city. Maybe it was feeling like a literal alien among my flatmates who spoke to me only to ask intrusive questions. Maybe it was just the obnoxious rent for such shitty conditions; I wasn't able to afford it for a second term even if I wanted to. After a few months of living in my car, I was able to find a decent flat in Banbury.

I don't mind the distance. If anything, I prefer it.

I turn off the music and drive through the city with only the hum of the engine and traffic lights for company. Though you might as well be in the passenger seat.

Your hair is in my teeth again.

Again? No. More likely they're the same strands you left there six years ago, a chronic discomfort I stopped noticing until you decided to remind me. Locked between molars, are splinters of you I never flossed out, bothered only with pseudo-efforts of fishing them with the sticky guts of dates or blocking the sensation by drilling pomegranate seeds in their place.

Doesn't matter how much spit I get in my mouth, I must still taste of you. Of camomile and honey.

I used to dream about it. Now, the remnants have rotten my teeth. Now, I'll do anything to get it out. Burn the taste buds from my tongue, if I have to. You could've asked me why I smoke instead. Then, I could've looked you dead in the eye and answered frankly: you.

Your gums are bloody again. You've still got filaments of my heart between your teeth. Is the aftertaste bitter? Fuck, I hope so.

Notes

Gehinnom: An afterlife place of punishment and/or purification.

Torahic: Relating to the Torah.

Banbury: A town north of Oxford.

*

I have a separate playlist for Isaiah's crying CD. It's called 'doriah breakup mix'. You can find it on spotify with the link in my bio if you wanna give it a listen :)