Mood: Monday morning. Coffee station at the office. Outside the window behind you outside calls with yearning. An eagerness that reminds you of last night. Of running barefoot singing your love to the moon. Sigh. Everyday shit.
And with his last breath he whispered, ‘run away, run as far and as fast as you can. Run, run and never look back.’ Then, nothing.
As if he were never there. As if the image of the man, grasping at the air, was nothing but a whisp of a borrowed imagination. Perhaps not borrowed but imposed. As if, if life were nothing but frequencies, a bump had you tuned into the wrong station for a while.
(run)
But you distinctly remember his voice. You hear him whisper to you in the evening as you do the dishes. In the moments of silence and still he is there. Sometimes, when you go for long walks at night, you catch a whiff of him in the alleys of town. And you could have sworn there was an image of him in a tunnel under a bankslave graffiti tag.
(run, as far and as fast as you can)
As clear as the faint construction sounds that you have now become accustomed to. Clear enough to exist. But hazy enough to create doubt.
(are you still running?)
Did he die? You remember it as his last breath but modern medicine has shown you that more often than not, death is curable. More a minor convenience than something that actually happens. Except of course when it does. And then we can come out in the competition of grief. Perhaps then, it was best for you to imagine that he was dead because you would like to hold on to the idea of sadness. To use his death to carry sentiment and to use this sentiment to give his words weight. His words, ‘run’ whispered with the distance of a man calling far from the shore, one hand on Katsumi’s shoulder, sailing into the sunset.
So you’re the one that needed him to die. For if it wasn’t his last breath then it could just be another thing that he said. A thing, in the delirious moment of near death. A thing deniable.
(do the dead run? How many countries participate in the Zombie Olympics? If you are dead, what are you afraid of? Run)
But, you know, you know because you know. Because you were there – until you weren’t. Even now, you wait. You wait for a resolution.
But only a whisper remains.
A whisper and a doubt.