Fiction

Au Revoir//Sorry We Are Not Here

By Anindya Arif

My brother's Omega Speedmaster is now fourteen years old. The ticking sound it makes, in my head, translates to an answering machine that keeps repeating the message "Sorry, we're not here" in a vacuum. I have always feared nostalgia melded with grief and the wild sheep chases it sends people on. That over and over (again) sends numerous on these futile wild sheep chases. Hoping for answers or anything resembling a lump of catharsis. Even though I have known none exists for a long time, I can not let go. So, every day, I hold onto my grief marginally tighter than before.

The following is an apology//delayed record of regrets.

Even though I have moved a million miles away from 13/3, our home still houses the toaster that always made me scream and the couch Ammu can not let go. The Sundays here still do not last long enough, and the Wednesdays continue on for too long with continuous sirens and rickshaw bells wailing faintly at sundown.

I was sure the years would pass me by in a flash, but not quite like this. Looking back on the years since, I have started to feel I have been driving on an endless road, taking every left turn with the past blaring in the distance. With the end of June, that's further than October, and right now, I am marooned and hoping I could call your number and you would return the call with anything other than silence.

June skies are now murky red in colour, and the air weighs heavy with a tinge of sadness. All my memories of you have withered over time; I cannot any more place the colours right by what I remember of them. My futile efforts at putting them back together just make them hazier in my mind. I spend far too much time these days portraying the role of a fictitious author who finds contradictions and paradoxes at the core of everything. To keep me from remembering how one can bring me acceptance, for what I have lost remains lost.

Now, on any chance I go back, I drive around the roads around Selise, purposely playing the tracks from your old “kunmusicshunba” folder that meant so much to you. Only to be overcome with the realisation that those are just places and tracks to me now. With you no longer approving or disproving my music choices in the car, whatever gave those places and records any significance is gone now, too.

However, after many years, the grief has remained the same. For the most part, 13/3 or 12/A have been reminded that it was just whatever made them home, not there anymore. All the remaining years will melt away by the wayside, too, as I spend the rest of my life trying to fill the vacuum you have left behind; when all the years inevitably fall off, I will finally sit with my grief in whatever ghost town I happen to be in and finally make peace with it. Even though my grief is not as much as it was one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days ago, it is no less. For now, I am still in mourning.

From my heart to your heart, all my love, still alive, who I love