BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

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FRIDAY
08.11.1996
ISAIAH

               My head falls back against the wall with a thud. Fatigue and the ache resounding through every ligament in my body would be enough to declare today torturous without Dorian's expression adhered to the back of my eyelids. It's half nine and I've already spent hours recounting last night.

'You had sex with someone, didn't you?' Why is that the first thing he assumed? Can I blame him? If me from last week had met myself last night, wouldn't that be the first thing I assumed too? Wouldn't that be what me from last week would have done: find someone to fuck me violently enough to bless me with a distraction at least for a moment?

Can I blame him for being disgusted? Am I not disgusting? Did God not bless me with Earthly life in a body and how do I honour it, by respecting it about as much as a petrol station urinal?

Did I make him feel equally used? I drag him around with me like an emotional support animal and lock him in the doghouse when I don't have a need for him. All I did was go to the river; I had no intention to hurt him. But I did. And I hate that I did. I spent five years wishing I could hurt him even a fraction of how much he hurt me and after the first cut, I'm already buried in regret.

Food has always been Dorian's means of expressing love. The first time he brought me food he'd made himself, I was suspicious to eat it, thinking that as a posh boy who has a family chef, he probably can't tell salt from sugar, only to eat my words along with the matzo ball soup. 

Aside from holidays when I felt comfortable leaving the Caribbean neighbourhoods of Lower Halsett to cross to the Jewish side, I never ate Jewish food. Auntie Tamila and the other women of my street taught me to cook recipes from the islands and I did my best to alter them kosher. The dishes Dorian learnt from his Polish cook were entirely new flavours to me, especially when he started experimenting with his own fusion of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Jamaican flavours. The food he made for me was just as intimate as the music he played when only I was listening.

The image of him waiting for me to come home last night while the chicken soup grew cold fertilizes the shame that strangles my body until creeping ivy transforms into pythons. They constrict tighter and tighter...

The click of heels yanks me from my rumination. I snap my head up to see Mrs Carter just as she turns the corner and sees me. She halts. Her shoulder-length twists are twined with much more grey than when I last saw her and a pair of glasses hang from a chain of multi-coloured wooden beads around her neck.

I raise to my feet, planning to reintroduce myself thinking she doesn't recognise me, but I don't get a word out before she smiles.

'Isaiah.' Mrs Carter sighs my name like a relative I've not seen in a long time. She crosses the distance and pulls me into a hug. 'Lovely to see you. I'm sorry about your mother.'

With no idea how to respond, I thank her.

Mrs Carter doesn't linger on the topic. Instead, she pulls away and beams. 'Are you here about the teaching position?'

'What?' I glance at the bench from where I stood for a HELP WANTED sign I missed upon arrival. There isn't one but I guess, when an adult shows up unannounced in the teachers' corridor of a school, what should she think? 'No, I were just thinking, could I borrow a computer and printer? One last time, promise. I need to print my dissertation and Moonlight ain't got none them those Microsoft tings.'

She squeezes my arm. 'Of course.'

Pressing my palms together over my chest, I stream 'thank you's. 'I can pay for the ink—'