The Undead
I wasn’t checking my email because dead people don’t check email. I was dead but I found ways to pass the time. I was not too unhappy about it. I existed as an undead person. I washed my hair very close to often enough and ate things and got some sleep at times of night or day that resembled normal times to be asleep. I had conversations with my husband about things in the world, things on TV, ideas I’d already talked about a hundred times, drawn from the fields of culture, art, and politics. It is very easy to do this when you’re dead, or undead. You don’t have to be alive at all. I didn’t even feel especially dead, but things that should have worried me did not worry me. I did not show up in mirrors. During those months, I was not there, could not be reflected or perceived by self or others. I took my baths in the dark, kept a bag of dirt from my homeland under the bed. As previously mentioned I did not check my email and did not care that I was not checking my email. I let fires rage and did not try to put them out. I didn’t feel the flames as they consumed me, surely, somewhere on the edges of my memory as a living person, consuming all of the alabaster cities of my life. I was not on drugs or medication or any other dulling force. I knew I was not a ghost because my body was there, all wrong but present. I was undead. My body grieved and bled and pained me. My hair grew vampire long. I got mad at my husband over the usual things, then forgot about it or forgave him or moved on in the usual way. It was a summer spent in the afterlife and it was not all bad.
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Your notebook entries are so useful as an example of what can be achieved in such a small space. Loved this one. Thank you for sharing.
This reminded me of when one is on the homestretch of finishing a novel. Trapped in a limbo between life and death. And then I thought of how it must feel for both the Israelis and the Palestinians of the diaspora right now.