Wish You Were Here

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For a little while, I find myself, and I’m ethereal as a pencil sketch. Faded and graphite-grey and drawn on the folded corner of a bank statement or a receipt or a scrap of forgotten paper. A mess of self-correcting lines and smudged edges and one corner shaded so thick it’s dark and shining and the paper has buckled under the weight of the strokes.

I hate it here. It’s so dark, so fucking dark, and I swear I keep tripping on the same twist in the carpet. You’d have hated it. You’d have been so angry. You’d have said, “Where the fuck’s the fun in this?” You’d have hated it.

You’d have hated it, here, in this place. I don’t really know where I am. It’s too dark to tell. They tell you all this stuff about being here. You know. It’s light. It’s remembrance. It’s forgiveness and salvation and all that other shit. It’s not, though, is it? Here. It’s not light at all. I can’t remember much. I don’t want to forgive anyone. I’m not in a very forgiving mood.

That stupid carpet. That fucking thing. I hated it with every fibre of my being. God, it was horrible. And it was that stupid twist, that stupid fucking twist that I never flattened. That twist was it. The final nail in my coffin. Pun one hundred percent intended. You always laughed at gallows humour.

My point is, it’s dark down here, and I keep losing myself in the dirt, and I really wish I’d said goodbye to you. I hope you didn’t cry at my funeral. I hate to see you cry.