Obituary

By Priscille Bukasa

She wants me to write her obituary while still on the phone…

laughing about yesterday’s episode of some show I can’t think of right now.

Our laugh slowly cripples to a cold chuckle,

gasping at the idling air,

submerging the room into an awkward silence

and she asks me to write her obituary.

The eulogy in her words sings of a tired hymn

waiting to be put to rest between

the closing prayer and the last amen

a morgue away from being a faded star,

still beaming in the sky,

reminding you of her beauty and mortality.

Instruction-filled mouth, she says,

Don’t cry for me down here.

Down here is not for me.

The sky is too low, and I need space.

I need a bird’s-eye view of what in the world is going on

a quick escape to sanitize my mind...

I pick Saturn.

I choose its rings.

I see how committed they are.

I pick a picket white fence,

to a place perfectly positioned,

preferably where the sun never goes down.

She is just shy of 30

and made from ocean waves

the unforgiving kind.

To say she has no dry ground,

no place for you to stand on.

Everything is temporary,

like favorite sweaters lived in too long.

She feels lived in too long,

like the seams on her are coming undone

faster than the stitches.

She asks me to get a head start on writing her obituary,

so she can correct my errors

as if they were mine in the first place,

as if the bullet came before the pistol.

Maybe that’s her way of saying

she already learned from her mistakes.

She wants to make sure I capture

the movie premiere of her,

not the copy still in production

the one that screams of an autopsy

that doesn’t say how we got here

and why we blow birthday candles on tombstones.

Death has a way of embracing the potential out of you

and still making a hero of you.

She says use words like jovial and exuberant

words that make you forget

how brittle goodbye tastes before it leaves your mouth,

how tomorrow becomes a marathon

the body has not yet trained for.

It’s funny how tomorrow always promises to be there.

It’s odd how we never promise back.

We casually show up.

She wants me to write her obituary before it’s too late.

Is there such a thing as being too on time

for something that is already too late?

Should I be grateful for this task I have yet to cry for?

She is still on the phone. She is still here.

But I feel too late.

Is it premature to say I’m sorry I was too late?

I don’t remember the last time she spoke to God,

but I can’t tell if the long distance is killing her.

I can tell she hasn’t seen the sun in days

knows her way around the dark.

The bleak room embraces her presence

like a blanket in need of company.

She is no guest here. She is full residence.

She’s the performer on her last tour.

How death looks more like living the longer she lives.

There’s a thing about favorite sweaters

that don’t want to be reminded

of how happy they used to be

when the weather was fitting.

Don’t unfold them to leave them bedside

they are no side piece to no one.

So I tell her she is fitting,

even when the seasons cease to exist

and forget to be who they are.

When you unfold yourself,

there is something to be said

of how cocoons labor into butterflies

independent of this world.

They become without say so and so are you.

She wants me to write her obituary,

before death catches her off guard.

How badly she wants me to write her back

into something that resembles a path

that she can cradle herself back into

and remember the smell of living past noon.

I don’t know what it’s like to be her

to be the bullet that came before the pistol,

and favorite sweaters lived in too long,

to be too much ocean and not enough ground to stand on.

She is an empty cathedral,

without the worship or the hallelujahs,

a signal flare that has begun her descent.

But she’s still here.

She’s still a lighthouse in need of a light

too much ocean,

she is drowning in her own waves.

And you are anchor.

You are still on the phone with her.

She is still here.

She is still here.

You are still HERE.