BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

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THURSDAY
07.11.1996
ISAIAH

               It smells like it always did: of cigarettes, singed hair, and the rose water she used to apply to her skin before that, too, became too difficult.

As I stand bolted to the threshold, a new odour glides over my trainers and drenches my ankles, from where it bloats to my head, unprecedented but identified with the first inhale — death. The rotting of a corpse for three days before anybody missed her enough to come looking clings to the walls like damp. Figment of my imagination or not, it's visceral.

When I dare my first step inside, wrapping my arms around myself in the chill, my eyes fall through the living room archway to the marigold sofa where I assume her body was found. It looks no different than when I left.

Nothing about the house looks different than when I left. I wish the patterned wallpaper would peel, the wicker chair adjacent to the sofa to rot and pulverise, for the fringe on the lampshade and curtains to burst aflame — for the ceiling to collapse. I wish the house would mourn so I might be able to.

But nothing looks different than when I left.

The living room is checkered by the same burglar bars behind the window that slice sunlight into rectangles. A framed map of Jamaica is still tilted from when one of Muma's men threw me against it and held me there by the throat so long I accepted death only to be dropped to the floor. Though the mint green fan beside the telephone is off, I hear it hum, as though I'm standing somewhere on the precipice of the past and the present and experience both in tandem.

In the kitchen, the five o'clock sun stamps the same triangles onto the same brown melamine cabinets that clash wonderfully with the same avocado green fridge and oven. In place of a toaster or kettle, neither of which we've ever owned, stands a dutchie pot because all the cupboards in our English kitchen are either too shallow or too narrow to store it. Scratches in the pattered linoleum floor glow as light fills them, scrapes from the dishes I dropped due to muscle spasms or the chair I dragged from the table to reach the upper cabinets as a child.

Not a thing has changed; neither fixed nor deteriorated further.

I think I'm hallucinating when I see August 1991 on the calendar beside the door but it doesn't leaf to November 1996 when I blink. I hug myself tighter. Muma didn't turn one page after I left.

Did the last five years of her life blend into one never-ending Thursday? Did time stop when it no longer measured anything of significance for her too? Minutes are minutes and hours are hours but time ceases to exist when there's nothing to count forward to. We both measured the days to my departure and sighed in relief when it arrived. Unfortunately, when you reach the peak of a mountain, there's nowhere to go but down.

I stare at it, praying for grief to emerge through the smoke that infests me though I still can't identify what's burning. Nothing comes. I don't collapse with agony nor am I struck by a revelation that makes sense out of all this — of my mother, of my existence, of the point of my existence.

Because what is the point? For me to slug through a hellscape where time doesn't exist and nor do other people — or if they do, their warmth is confined someplace I can't touch? A hellscape I can only temporarily escape through violence I purposefully incite so I can watch the bruises heal and, sicker still, dig my fingers into them whenever I start to miss life?

Surely, this is Gehinnom. Scripture claims it for the dead but for all intents and purposes, I'm as dead as my mother.

Muma was right: I am just like her. If not worse, because I'd sigh at her lazy refusal to care for herself enough to lock the door at night, all the while alleging whatever I've been doing for the past five years isn't self-destruction. My men are the sons of her men — twice as homicidal. Her men would kill her if she got on their nerves; my men will kill me because they're bored and I happen to be around.