How To Distract Yourself From Dying.

1. You can’t, but you convince yourself you might be able to. Also, you’re not in the best position to clean out of earth. You’re on a saloon chair, having your hair washed.
2. You make the plan anyway. Finish hair, pick up your friend from the park when she arrives. Measuring for African time she will be later than five, but you plan on getting there at least five minutes early. You will fail at this because you have failed at everything for the past few months.
3. Failure. You must not think of that, too direct, too clean a line to dying. You remember Patrick Melrose episode one, a hunched over Cumberbatch whispering “I want to die. I want to die.” You understand him completely.
4. Hair washing has turned to hair braiding. If your eyes catch the mirror you avert quickly. Your image is another suicidal trigger. Its the same face, Fulani nose with the slight bend towards the bottom. Lips on permanent pout, smooth skin. But like that time you came back from Europe and your mother said “you look older”, when you return from this odyssey she will say something of how you’ve changed. But its not really that your face has changed, its that it has imbued itself with pain, with terror, with disappointment. With failure. You look away and resolve not to use mirrors again.
5. One of your close friends made a resolution to die at thirty and was surprised he lived past it. You consider this strategy. Why not? That’s five years left. But what will you do with them?
6. Every time a “logical” reason for you not to die pops up, a firmer reason to die erases it. For family, yes but if you had to be around them in that country, you would have been dead much earlier. Friends? I guess but you can’t trust them with your darkness yet. So who will consume it with you when the good fleeting times pass?
7. Romance? LOL
8. You have to die. There is no way you can exist every day in this form. And you can try to change, but shit like that is never up to you. And you’re clearly ill equipped to adjust your thinking or perspective. Death wins, again.
9. You called mummy twice this morning. Again in the afternoon and she hasn’t picked. Serves you right, for all the times you also ignored her calls. But what if this is my last call? You can’t go through it without speaking to her at least once. Can you?
10. Everything pushes the desire to die at you. The crippling mediocrity around, the limitations of the thinking, the proof that you with your wit and ascendancy are not better then them, but suffer more because you think you are.
11. Sex! Yes a good distraction. You text the kind beard god, but he doesn’t reply. Not surprised, he’s never around his phone. Call him maybe?
12. Hair braiding is going slower than projected. Of course. You will be late to pick up your friend. Another reason to die. Knowing that being here means you will always be late.
13. You could leave, but you’d just be thrown into new dynamics of problems. The world is a choice between evils. Except you were born into circumstances that prevented that. You were not.
14. I want to die. Patrick Melrose, I see you.
15. Try to read. Fail to read.
16. Twitter. This works for five minutes.
17. This is too much responsibility. It should be simple. You can’t swim. Finish hair. Go to the deep end of a pool and jump inside.
18. But you have to call mama first…