It was like this:

forested, dark, blurry, us bobble-heads.
whatdid yo u do to your arm, i slurred. thought’d be stupid.
i tried to kill myself, you told the nearest tree, and also me.
oh, i didn’t know you were sad, i said.
i’m sad, you said.
are you sad? you said.
i looked at the river.
i wish i was dead, i said to to the river, you said me too, and then you grabbed my hand and we walked into the river together until it was up to our collarbones,
and i started crying, i’m sorry i said
i’m sorry too you said and then we went home and you wore my pajamas and we slept on opposite sides of my bed.

and then you hanged yourself in your shed.

i’m still sad, i say to the trees, to the river,
they don’t talk back

do you change the time in your head when you glance at the clock?

i cling, goofy, to small words. not tightly. hanging. 

in kensington we drank gin with lyza. you began, enthusiastically, a story about a conversation you and i had grocery shopping the week before. succinct details. a writer’s brain. me, who has loved an endless string of forgetful people, who forget things in sequence until it is me who slips their mind, i cling to this.

we pulled up to gisimba’s old orphanage. it was midday. she ran over and pressed her tiny frame against my leg, big eyes staring up. muraho inshuti i said, muraho, she said, took my three small fingers in her palm.

i asked her if she had fallen, pointing to the blood on her skinned knee. the orange dirt made it look volcanic. she said nothing, staring. i reached into my bag and pulled out a wipe, folding over to remove the blood, three-weeks trained on skinned knee repair. the boys were always hurt.

wit'wande? i said.

jessie, she said.

jessie took my phone and ran off. we talked with the coordinators for a while about beer and chris brown and the history of gisimba. when she came back i only knew from a light tug on my pant leg. jessie was impossibly tiny.

amakuru? i said.

ni meza, she said, handed me my phone.

on the ride back to kigali i scrolled through my pictures. jessie had taken 24 blurry photos of her skinned knee.

XI

i left my naturopath and i walked two kilometers and i collapsed on a curb.
i cried about my body and i cried about my friend who is gone now.
unmoored, i walked into chapters and straight to a book. my body hurts me now but it still is good at finding books. my body touched murakami’s first two novels, hear the wind sing and pinball, recently printed for the very first time. i opened hear the wind sing. it was a page about a man jumping off the empire state building. i bought the book.

in may i read murakami because may is like this: transient. in may time is funny. 

this may i went to the library to pick you out kafka on the shore because i thought it would be good for your heart which is stuck right now. but i read a few pages of kafka on the shore and i remembered how strange it was, there are talking cats in it, and how you probably might not like it, so i googled best murakami novel and google said a wild sheep chase so i rented a wild sheep chase and i read most of it in the bathtub when my pain would be too bad to do anything else.

i didn’t like a wild sheep chase. it made me feel strange and not good strange. i didn’t like that The Rat hanged himself from the ceiling because that is what my friend did. but the characters in a wild sheep chase are the characters in hear the wind sing and i liked that, i liked that coincidence a lot.

i remember when i woke up in the middle of the night three years ago on your chest and started crying. i was crying for a different time. in may time is funny.

last thursday i left you for a while and walked down queen street. a man stopped me and said i looked so happy and it made him happy how i looked. i wanted to tell you this story but i didn’t think you would believe it and maybe you would think it was silly so i didn’t tell you.

i also didn’t tell you these things:

- i loved you three years ago
- i never stopped loving you
- i don’t know when i ever will not love you

“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore