KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER

For those who are in grief, those who fall, who crack open.

I really need to talk. I think of calling a friend. I imagine the excuse, “I’d really like to come but I have a million things to do.” That’s alright. But sometimes we shouldn’t bargain with the need of a friend. Sometimes it’s not convenient to be there for a friend. Sometimes we should just eat inconvenience, shove in with the rest of those magnificent self important little reasons we give not to be there. But instead we count our magnanimity and say, “I’m always there. But…”, one word to negate everything before it, that ‘but’. I try to be reasonable but my need is too great. Another ‘but’, my negation.

A million things race through my mind. You leaving, having to go. Another sudden uncontrollable exit, another issue to deal with. To me, it seems our relationship has consisted of this, issues to deal with one after the other. I can’t bear it. It seems unreal, unfair, stuck in a Salvador Dali painting, an unconsciousness that snuck its way through the backdoor of the conscious and faked its appearance as reality. I am dumbfounded. It is unbelievable.

My friend has died not three days ago. Mortality is a given and still my heart is waterlogged and drowning. Then there is me, I am writing fripperies, cauterised metaphors. I am dilating in the mess of words and emotions somersaulting, crashing in, flailing in the midst of something that does not quite resemble a storm, there is an order here. It’s demanding, uncomfortable, insisent with no map to show how, how to navigate the waters, the tempest. It has messages. I know this. Far-reaching dialogues to have with me, I want it but my lexicon fails me in this torrent. My lexicon is deficient, brutally ignorant. For this I cannot forgive myself. I am a writer after all, so they say. It’s a fucking joke.

I trip through the hours riding the inevitability of this fall. No I am not afraid of this fall. Falling is flying in the opposite direction. Don’t mistake my ranting for fear. I need this fall as much as any of you. It is direct speech from beyond. Now I rummage through my data preparing for the onslaught of another dig inside myself. I welcome it with the ravenous intent of a junkie. It doesn’t mean I’m not uncomfortable, isn’t that the nature of my previous analogy? A certain amount of discomfort and then, the spring, the taste of hope, a slight alteration in the scope of my vision, the tilt. Brain chemistry helter-skelter catching and releasing messages none of us can fathom, opening the synapses a little wider than what we call normal, entering a paranormal state. Here is the only dictionary that will do.

Psychological analysis is inadequate to describe this. It is a ‘magic’ beyond our reach. Nature knows.

So I will not call a friend. I will not say the words “I need”, just to hear the inevitable response is too busy to meet the need. I will fall in the opposite direction or fly in the opposite direction and see you on the other side. For now the ordinariness of life is impossible to find. Death makes this possible, that is its incredible gift, mortality.

Mortality stops us in our tracks. It has that ability yes. It shows us how to breathe, dark, cool, deep, bubbles into and out of our lungs at the precise moment someone we love has let theirs go for good. A body releases, a last breath re-calls.

Roberto you have gone but not been re-called. Ross you have gone and been re-called.

I remain. My breathlessness is many breaths away and my skin is still covering the otherness of me now. I am dancing with life, mating, grabbing, racing, stopping, still filled with molecules that thirst, drink, hunger, eat, lust, mate, love and break. Don’t imagine we are any different, you and I.

It doesn’t matter what we think we are, all the time we are this flesh, still hanging in this flesh, we speak the same body language. This flesh will be honoured in some way. It will. And it won’t always require your permission either. Don’t imagine we’re so different you and I. We’re the same. In this realisation we should find our peace.

And here is the kicker, we don’t. I smile at this mostly. It’s a cruel smile at times, devilish in the knowledge that you cannot outrun the flesh it has to release you. But it’s only cruel when you rely on the ignorance of your self-importance. You know the things religions the world over have made us believe about being human. Those things we think we need to believe to live. No not the presence of God/dess, but our importance above all species. Try not to think of this as so important, of yourself as so important. This thinking will free you to allow life and your time here to exist in its fullest potential. This is the irony of life. Self importance kills the experience. There is no honour in it, save an honour you will have to leave behind simply to discover it was the noose around your neck for too long. God’s intention, in my opinion, is simple: live. It’s the only sacred thing. It is the only altar I can pray at.

I will dream. I will hurt. I will love. I will hate. I will be uncomfortable. I will make love, have sex, lust, drink too much, say too much, sometimes. I will rip my own umbilical cord to shreds, hold fast to my convictions and then let them go one by one to prevent them from strangling me. Life will enable this if I let it. I will fight. I will surrender. I will need you and I won’t. I will know myself and I will often not like what I see. I will forgive in the way humans do without understanding the full extent. I will have pain and allow it to engulf me. I will be happy in equal measure to every single unhappy thing I experience. They are the sum of each other.

There is no finite identity. This is no comfort, it is insanity. None of it is important. It is important that we know this. We wear the garments of change all through our lives. Our memories of this phenomenon are often vague, precious little of this knowledge remains under the scope of the distribution of finite ideologies. Yes even religion with all its fancies about heaven and the after life is a finite propaganda. I include all books that attempt to propagate stories of God, new age, Jewish, Muslim, Christian…etc.

We have created a dense dependency for ourselves relying on an idea of God/dess that is foreign to us in its nature, in its tendency, in its potential. Because of this we end by never knowing ourselves, not even a little. We look in the wrong places, miss the little signs that happen all the time. We are insane.

What a remarkably indecipherable signature we have created in our absence from our presence in all things, and our absence from the presence of all these things in us. Self annihilation.

I am applying no science to this letter.
Yes let’s call it that. A love letter.
Perhaps.

You may discard whatever you like, all of it, none of it, enough of it to be comfortable, that is your right. I don’t want to be comfortable with this. I want to it to eat me and scramble my dialect, open my cupboards, unfasten my gathered information and let in the dissident and the ruthless. Who else will be as honest with me?

All my love,
Khadija