On Wounds That May Never Heal

There is nothing left here
Except the story
Of how morning became night
(Page 23, A Girl's Body is a Story)

When my friend died in 2019, I got the news at home. It was December. I had called her that morning to ask her something really important, but she didn't respond. A few hours later, a friend of ours called me to tell me that he heard she died some days before that day.

I took it as a bad joke, and I called her again and again, but got no response. Later in the evening, her brother broke the news via her WhatsApp account. It was a picture of my friend's lifeless body followed by a vague story of how she was murdered.

We knew nothing - the reason behind her murder or her murderer(s). She was just gone. Gone. Before her death, we lived like siblings. Same hostel. Same church. We shared meals, clothes, secrets, a bed and indeed, many things.

I did not write about it instantly. You see, grief can leave even the finest wordsmiths tongue-tied. When we resumed school for the final year, I couldn't walk past her door. Her name was sacred, and it was not to be mentioned carelessly. We recounted the horror story of her murder in whispers.

We shed and shared tears when we discussed the what-ifs. We, the ones she left behind, sat together a few times and let the grief swallow us for a moment. We were falling apart while reminding ourselves of the times she held us together. We ended such conversations with silence.

I remember someone telling me he expected me to have healed and moved on in January. I wondered if timelines existed for things like this. How long does it take you to learn how to forget a part of you? How long do you ask yourself the questions you have no answers to?

Days became months, and I was compiling poems for my debut book, "A Girl's Body is a Story." I tried to write my memory of her into a poem and named it "The Elegy," but I do not consider it poem enough to hold the depth of it.

I think of her occasionally, sometimes overwhelmed by sadness, other times smiling at the memories we made. People say you never truly get over the loss of a loved one, only learn to live with it. I wonder how many times we will have to teach ourselves to bear the weight of what we cannot forget, to hold spaces in our hearts that no tears or memories can fill.