that sick ceiling

or aaaaawaaaaaaa as the fan would say

i. the forgone details¹

The bird is taking me where I’m supposed to be; the bed creaks at night but I can’t seem to feel the warmth of a body; I hear the curtains move with the breeze of the sun; something stirs and slips through my hands into drawers; I listen for him in the wood of the house; it was nighttime but the daytime peaks though; I rise to the unwelcome inevitability of light; I wash my pits and his pillows; I curdle the milk and saturate the colors; brown turns to yellow turns to white; I find myself becoming less; I can’t seem to find the right words or position on his bed; the imprint of a body long gone, deteriorating under the pressure of soil and sun. A brevity to a finality. Are the grains of his body finite? Will my grandchildren touch him as they play in the sand? I drive an old hour and search for him in a few digits engraved in common stone; the road twists and his sunglasses on the dashboard protests as it moves with the road; I am led to distant land; I walk the furled path into a field, saturated with Arabian palm trees; the grass is patchy and pale, like a sample offering; I stand and the dust piles up in my chest; I look away a moment to catch myself from breathing; The offerings, defined for and despite their incompletion, brings about an instant familiarity; I bend my knees down until they become capsules; I make the connection and make conversation; I am sorry when I audibly exhale in between my words; I am not sure if it is him or the grass that I speak to, but it is something²; it is reaching something; I assure myself that the bird is somewhere on the field. 

1. the details

i hadn’t slept for two days at this point. ever since the hour of his death was stapled onto a paper and was swallowed down my throat and into my heart, no sleep would come. there’s coal living on in the hour of his death so there is coal in my heart. i begin to wonder where the world has gone now that he is in a dark freezer waiting to be washed with sidr. he loved for his body to be clean in life and now this will be honored in his death. the sun comes and goes. i’m told the weather outside has never been this beautiful. i catch bleeding sunsets and curse them for continuing to come without his eyes to witness them. 

i hadn’t eaten in two days. they try to coax food into my mouth but my throat is dry. the paper is stuck there and there’s coal and there’s little space left in my stomach. the grief is filling. i lie down on the L shaped couch with my brother on the other side. i let his legs stretch and touch my neck. we are camped outside my parent’s bedroom, caring for a mother who has lost a son. she runs wild at night and we pat her back until she can see sleep. i give her his shirt and his smell climbs to the broken heart. the coal hisses in acknowledgment. 

i begin to see him when i am awake even though we are at the heart of his funeral. he is watching me and mocking us. my body screams but i move forward. i take care of him and her and her and her and him and her and i forgot about all the organs burning inside my body. from the corner of my eye, i see him watching me and there’s an all-knowing grin on his face. his body is turned towards the side and i wonder if he’s angry with me.

in the between of fajr prayer and fajr, my body is handed an hour of sleep. here, i receive my first visit. in the dream, he is sitting cross legged in a white, unstained kandoora. on his head is a ghitra and he is looking down at a huge plate, a thabeeha. a sifra laid out for a party of one with yellow rice and a small goat. he is eating with his hands and feasting in a relaxed manner, as if there’s more coming. bite after bite after bite before he looks up a moment and lock eyes with me. there’s that smile that wrinkles the corners of his eyes until they disappear; this smile was his. not that of the hallucination. he looks back down and continues eating. my heart breaks with joy. i awaken with a profound sense that i made a promise. my burning lungs turn to dust, and i am visiting his grave for the first time. i will not forget this but let us forgo the details here. the promise i made while seeing him enjoy his feast is that i will force down food for his sake. it is islamified knowledge that each grain of the meals one eats during the three days of the funeral are ajr for the deceased. i eat and eat until the coal burns closer to my intestines. i eat on the sifra laid out for a funeral of a hundred as i tell them the dream and there’s yellow rice here too. my aunt, the dream interpreter, confirms that it was his soul visiting me from his afterlife. he is coming to me first to thank me for i was handling his affairs and leading on the donations in his name. she continues but i don’t care for the details; what matters is that i can make new memories with him.

2. When I am finished, I let wilting conversations had through voice notes reply to me.

وينج أنا نفس المكان تعالي شليها أقولج ربيعي بيبات عندي اذا بتنزلين او شي خبريني أقولج اباج اتسويلي شسمه تكتبيلي فوق بقولج شتسوين دقيقة هيه الاثنين يعني هيه هيه أنا اللي بسويه يعني هو يختار الصورة و أنا اسويه و كتبي بعد لو يبون يركبون هذا ب١٠٠ هذا هذا أحلى طرشيلي هذا بعطيج الرقم الحين دقيقة هذا أنا أنا ترا أنا بتفق ويا الريال الحينه

I string his mundane words together from August of last year and play with them until they make sense again in the first August to come without him. I wonder if they’ll make sense next August, too.