He died on Christmas Eve, 2016.
It began many, many years ago, as the last dead twigs were swept away and a brittle chill filled the air, and the children chattered plans for winter. He joined their anticipation, and made up wonderful plans of noisy family dinners, lavish gifts and the sweet, annoying nag of grandma. Then came school break. He left the warm, bright mirage where he made it, and dragged home his frail weary wilted frame. The fantasy smelled like honey roast and chocolate.
He made a small plastic tree, about the size of his palm, wrangled it in coloured beads and glittery strings. He made tiny boxes with gift wrap and fixed them under the tree atop a card-box stand. The beams from his desk lamp cascaded around it, warm and smiling like sunshine.
The house was silent. Upstairs neighbors shuffled their tables and rumbled his ceiling. Occasionally a loud commotion broke out and laughter soaked through the walls. The clunk of feet dancing, din of plates and knives meeting, and the smell, oh the smell riled him most. It seemed to seep into to the fabrics of his pajamas and went with him everywhere. He hated it enough to venture outside his room, into the domain of the Bad Stuff. He took another hot shower, but even the thick seething steam could not purge the smell from his lungs. He resented the fact the smell made him hungry.
He slogged to the kitchen and picked up a cold plate of leftovers. “Why are you still eating now? Look at you, you’re so fat.” Father barked behind him, his face twisted in the dim light of the TV. The door to mother’s room was shut. Faint orange light spilled from the seams.
He went back to his room, locked the doors behind him, and turned on the music to keep out the Bad Stuff. It almost concealed the silence. He licked the last of the tasteless mush off his plate, his face wet from the shower and from something else. That night he dreamed for the umpteenth time that he would wake to find one of his parents standing next to the bloodied corpse of the other, and his life was in ashes.
Under the seams, from shadowy closets, out of every dark cranny the Bad Stuff peered at him.
Years went by. With each passing winter he became a little harder, a little harsher. The Bad Stuff huddled a little closer.
*
Winter came again. He saw snow for the first time, a soggy dirty black muck that lined the corners and splattered everywhere. They didn’t have snow where he came from, but he knew it was not supposed to look like this. Where was the lush white velvety blankets?
It was near midnight. He had stumbled onto an unfamiliar street, lined by uniform gardened houses squeezed seamlessly together. Light spilled out from open curtains like the guts from a disembowel rainbow-coloured reindeer.
He scurried on, huffing and shuddering. He had saved up a whole week to afford a turkey-dinner-for-one that cost a little over seventeen pounds. It was thoroughly dissatisfying. The whole time as he scoffed down dry potatoes he saw the cute cashier girl casting pitiful glances towards him, even though he left surreptitiously via the self-checkout counter.
What was she doing tonight? He wondered. Probably in one of those houses, dressed in a whimsical holiday sweater, that crimson snow-flaked scarf she wore in the shop draped loosely around her purple tipped hair. She’d be smiling, no doubt. Her petite frame swaying with music. Meandering around a crowded room her eyes would catch those of her boyfriend, and they’d share a sly look in anticipation of awesome Christmas sex.
The tie was feeling suffocating. He had worn his best suit on his walk. His feet were cold and sour. The leather shoes chafed his toe and made lonely clunks against the pavement. His coat did nothing but trap the cold in. He was cold, cold and hollow to the bones.
His phone buzzed midnight.
How did he get here? He wondered. How did he end up here?
It wasn’t through idleness and neglect. His grit was indomitable. It wasn’t stupidity – he found a way to leap continents. Maybe it was the sheer happenstance of life? His time wasn’t here yet. He was the caged bird who broke through the shackles but forgot – if only for a moment – how to fly.
His mind soared at the thought that this too shall pass, that one day, he too would find a company of loved ones, and the Bad Stuff would be finally kept at bay.
He went home, knees weak but spirit high. The Bad Stuff was waiting for him.
*
The Bad Stuff. Not the frustrations of mistakes, the pangs of heartbreak, the agonies of loss. The Bad Stuff.
It dug into him the next morning and every morning thereafter, for the years to come. He opened his eyes and felt a heavy weight hook on every fiber of his body, dragging him under. It was momentarily tempered by a hot shower and the prospects of dawn, but flared up again when he stepped back into his world. The Bad Stuff asked, as he was smacked in the face by the moist, acrid, cramped odour of unwashed sheets and sweaty socks, by the sight of his life strewn about, ‘so what?’ The Stuff that rendered all his plans for tomorrow bland and muted, the Stuff that played each harrowing moments of his life in loop, the Stuff that drained the colours from his memories of yesterday.
The Stuff that came from within, from the labyrinth of his mind, a tenebrous all-encompassing cloud, an incomprehensible, inexplicable, inescapable sense of despair. The Stuff that made him taste tar in sugar, perceive hope as calamity, and tumble to the very edge of annihilation.
The Stuff that made him want to shout like a bitter and frustrated child, without restraint, with the full might of his body, the Stuff that make him want to bash his fists into his face until he was bloodied and purple, and to plunge a blunt and rusty knife into his legs until it scrapped bone, and to hurl himself through the window. The Stuff that made him want to cause pain and do violence unto himself so that the muffling stifling wrenching knot in his chest is broken, and the voiceless shapeless nameless void is given shape.
*
He died last night, on the 24th of December 2016, unceremoniously and inaudibly as a ghost.
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