The Grave I Have Buried Myself Into

By Reedhima Tyagi

June 15 2008

I am playing in our front yard under the watchful gaze of my mother. The colours of the sky seep into my bones.I take a deep breath which fills up the furthest cell of my body. I am not dead.

August 2011

I walk hand in hand with a girl who wonderously narrates about all the planets in our solar system. It feels me with joy knowing that there is only one moon who I offer my utmost fondness and love. I fall in love with the moon a little more every night. I am not dead.

September 2013

I win the first prize in a competition at school. Everybody looks at me with admiration. I feel a wave of thrill rolling from head to toe, then back. I grin with pleasure. my body roars alive and I am not dead.

October 2017

A boy trips me while I am walking and I fall head first on the floor. He grins sadistically at my form. I stand up and push him down on the floor. My hands tremble and my heart weighs heavy inside my chest. I feel a little dead.

November 2019

I fail a class. I am made to stand in front of the class and the teacher shouts at me. My body violently shakes under an impalpable burden. I bury my head in the collar of my shirt and run off away from everybody. I think I may be dying.

December 2022

It is a beautiful day. Now, the evening sky unfurls its wings. Its underside pale white casting a heavy shadow on the entirety of my soul. I feel myself the softest of nudges pushing me off the ledge. I am dying a death today that has been hovering over me all my life.

Before actually being dead, I had, in reality, died numerous unremarkable, unchronicled deaths. This is the last death I will get to die. That small interval of time when I discerned what I had done, scared me. I wanted to be back. It felt as if the person who stood on the ledge was different from the person who fell. I struggled to rewind back myself through time. There were voices I heard under the veil of a shrilling white noise. I tried to search for the high and low of a knowing voice, but found nil. I struggled to let out a word, wanted to scream. I thought death was merciful, that it let all dying having their last favorite words hang in the air as they slipped to somewhere far away. But as for me it was a fight with death to break its hold, while at the same time bargaining, promising, begging- with life to hold onto me a little tighter and not let go. I, on the brink of tripping and falling of this strange slope, had suddenly felt a weight pushed off my chest. I heaved for words that found their way on internet and newspapers till, truthfully, too many more words piled up on it and everyone forgot which words were mine. The words trip out of me before I can stop them from falling. ‘I don’t’, were what had come out before I had lost the war and the weight slowly pushed on me again, not for the last time I know now. In death my mouth still tastes sour from those words.

Even so the people that mattered, the people I loved and the people, who in all my darkness, had found a way to love me again, remember more than I hoped they would. I realize that my last existing moment has cursed all their living ones. My truth, I learn now, is that I had lied to myself so profusely and relentlessly to convince me of all tales I had fabricated against my own self. I never had the courage to face myself in the mirror and since fate is more unfair in death than in life, the mirror today is all broken into infinite miniscule pieces. At present- I am just dust lingering on a window sill. I am carrying the burden of my death only half. As if a part of me has been sucked back into the living world, against my will.

I once believed that my living was a hindrance to the smooth sailing world. I thought of myself as a pirate whose tales of cruelty turned all the sailors away from the sea. I was awaiting the moment the ticking of the clock would subside so I could fall out of this nightmare. But now that I have ended my story with the dreaded full stop, my palms itch to drag a comma all over my last page. I find myself hanging onto ropes, trying not to slip away from here. I can just let go, let myself turn be into a phantom for the living. Even though I am dead or if still not, I will not be able to hold onto the ropes for longer. I want to find a way to live again. I am ready to be a son to my parents, a brother to my sister, a friend to a friend. I am ready to be the wallflower of a hundred paintings for the sake of loving the living I have left behind. Their powerlessness in the situation I have led them to, lead me to fall deeper in my fateful tragedy. My living was a bigger tragedy than my death. Out of selfishness, I have now let my ending sow seeds of tragedies in the living I love. My mother who cooked, who sang, who hugged, will have to become half of a mother she had been. Her tragedy occurs as a dead son than a son who lived in grief. My father who worked, who played, who lulled me to sleep, whose pinkie I had held so many times will only be half of a father for forever. His tragedy occurs as a son who never became half of the man, he had promise him. My being dead has robbed them of a part of themselves I will never be able to return them. From how I always found myself to be the one who was always left wounded, a wail echoing out of me like a helpless soldier, I am now to have become the king who sacrificed everyone pious to him to achieve the fulfilment he desired. No one in death teaches me how to wipe myself clean out of this blood that stains me.

By Reedhima Tyagi