FICTION
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Year : 2, Issue : 18
by Moonsharin Ahmed
You are wide awake again. You pull out the A Level chemistry textbook you stole from the school library nearly three decades ago. It has coloured pictures and silky smooth pages, nothing like the rough photocopied books they sell at the local bookstores. You caress the picture of the emerald flame of copper chloride. This is the first act of what has quickly become your insomniac ritual.
You lay the book lovingly on your bed. It’s a queen sized bed, although you are single, a single woman in her mid-forties. Then, from underneath the mattress you pull out a large sheet, and it’s no ordinary sheet. Several beautiful pages were blended and dried to produce this thick handmade paper. It’s not just that you like the finer things in life. You like the idea of the death and dissolvement of beautiful pages being rebirthed as handcrafted paper. You tell yourself you like that idea. You tell yourself you are not forcing yourself to like that idea.
You have nearly filled up every inch of the paper in your tiny handwriting. You gaze at it. It began gradually, this scribbling. There were those nights when you were too tired but too wired to sleep. In order to fall back asleep you tried meditating, which left you furiously awake. That deep into the night mindless scrolling of your phone gave away to a stark evaluation of your life. The incessant voice you had suppressed during the day clawed out from your gut. You felt it surge up like a heartburn, until it scratched your tongue and you whisper-screamed, “What have you done in life? What have you achieved?” You haven’t done anything concrete.
Right now, you think of how your life energy is sapping away, so you perform the second part of your insomniac ritual. You touch the picture of the red flames of strontium chloride. You are reverent. In your mind, you have always equated life energy with light energy. Long ago, in your chemistry lab, you had no idea that the intensely beautiful flames of metal salts would be imprinted in your memory so deeply. You never knew it then, that the prejudices you formed, and the taste in art and music you formed in your younger years will endure.
Momentarily you are soothed. You close your eyes. You are imagining yourself glowing with success, radiating with success. In fact, you are so successful you are bioluminescent. Then you take one sharp sigh and you are back in your present mind.
Ever so slowly, you look at what you have written on the large sheet. Yes, it still feels odd to see it. It’s odd to see all the obituaries. It started with good intentions; your habit of finding and writing obituaries of people from all over the world. All you wanted was to see how others had lived their lives. You thought it would help you map out your own life. In those sleepless nights, you started Googling obituaries. Soon you saw the inevitable pattern. Only extraordinary people have obituaries in national newspapers. Only extraordinary people have obituaries that appear in the first page of a Google search. You can’t figure out the blueprint of such great lives. In a heartbeat, your existential angst has you in a chokehold.
As a third part of your insomniac ritual, you rock back and forth for seven minutes. On the sheet, only the bottom right corner is empty. Surrounding this space are obituaries of two nameless people. First, there is the obituary of a slum dweller, a man in his twenties who died of rabies in 2016. You picked it because rabies is a disease you can be inoculated against, and his death was preventable. Second, there is the obituary of the wife of a nameless fisherman, who died in a boating accident, during a day when the sea was calm. You have to fill in the last remaining space, a special space.
There are boxes and boxes of fireworks underneath your bed, in a locked suitcase. Fireworks are the easiest way to get metal salts. You had difficulty procuring these large quantities of fireworks. You scoured your local market. Later, you went to markets on the outskirts of the city, places where women are neither expected nor welcomed. Once a neighbour spotted a packet of fireworks and delightedly asked if there was going to be a wedding. You hastily made up an excuse about buying them for your nephew. You left before your neighbour commented about the strained relationship you have with your family.
The last part of your ritual will be setting the fireworks alight. You want to see the pure colours of the flames again. Fire will burn with pure energy, so unlike your life energy that feels inefficient. You tell yourself the beauty of the future flames will be unmatched. You cannot complete the ritual without filling in the last part of the obituaries sheet.
