A Little Extra

My room is a mess, it almost always is — save for when a friend says (s)he is coming over. I jump out of bed and kick things to the darkness beneath my bed. I pick up clothes — clean and untidy, and shove them in my wardrobe. I grab my air-freshener and let it rip. On the odd day, I spray a few puffs of perfume, and open the windows, so it smells like a human lives here.

With him, it did not matter. If he was coming over, he saw my room in its full glare; biscuit wrappers, empty bottles of iced tea, and prints of academia articles playing about on the floor. He saw my empty bowl from yesterday’s lunch, and from the day before, and the day before the day before. He knocked and I did not open my door halfway, I did not hide my oh so personal shame.

He came in that day to say hello. He had moved off campus, and I rarely ever saw him; plus, he was now in a different lecture fraction. He said hello, and we laughed about the pitiful state of my room. I quipped that I lived like a drug-dealer, he laughed the way he always does; loud with a slight screech, and seeming to add a little extra sound, a more emphatic laugh perhaps. Someone owed him money, and had refused to pay. But he was forgiving and a bit lax about it.

Months went by.

He asked me about a dark and rather disturbing poem I had written for a Nigerian on-campus magazine. I informed it was random, and had no deeper meaning. He laughed, with the same ‘little extra’. He told me about his newly acquired Playstation 4, and I probably made an unfulfilled promise to visit.

Then it happened, he went the way of all flesh. Poof like dust, a beautiful dust with a little extra dustiness, he was gone.

Two years, and wounds have healed, or perhaps grief has become habit, and the pain, now in normalcy.

I sit here in the rather spacious living-room of my Buckingham apartment, studying for a looming examination. It mirrors my typical bedroom situation, as I am doing my laundry.

I miss him.

Today, I missed him a little extra.

12/06/15