My dog November died today. Neither lost nor left but died. And he is never coming back. They say I shouldn’t worry, they say I shouldn’t grieve at all. To despair is to cry over what was already lost. That I shouldn’t wish him back. That I should not prolong the pain. That I should stop. That I should . . . That I should. . . . That, they tell me. Words, all words that never seemed comforting. If words could dispel sadness as easily as one could utter or write them, that I would be healed this instant. If words could make me forget, then I shouldn’t stop writing. But the words came out fast, one after the other and so did the tears and the tears blot the pages. Now the pages bore the memory of a loss. Oh, if it’s that easy then pour in all misery, that it may extinguish what cruel hands have written.
I should never forget him crouched on the piano like a penitent beast, playing Chopin or that time when we played Cesar Franck Sonata. To love in a distance, to have without holding. Now I am reminded of a corpse whom I sung a Puccini aria with. That I should be strengthened the next time I hum it. Nessun Dorma. Aye, no one sleeps. Now that he does not live, I shall stay awake in blind hope, to stare at death in the eye.
But I thought I heard him walk towards the front door the other night and smelt the redolence of his breath through it. His sigh and putrid smell lingered and moved me to an inconsolable longing. I thought I heard him knock on my door, singing his melancholy or swaying to the groove of his blindly fuelled rage. Hurriedly, I unlatched the door only to find a pack of smoke welling out from the coldness of the night. He wasn’t there. He was never there like I imagined him, waiting, yearning that he might need me. I closed the door, more grieved, the way I would for several times but left the window open if he is too shamed to come in by the door. If love never found its way to my door at least it’ll find me, solitary, by the window writing this melancholy.
I was his other, his other self. I was the other half of him that he couldn’t afford to be.
I was the madness that drove him insane, the love that dare not speak its name. November; my soul, my life, my lust, my sin is dead and I never got to win his affection. Nothing more did I ever get from him, spare the mark of his teeth out of the rejection. He bit me, more than once. He fed on me and tore my skin with his bare teeth. Now, a faint blemish bore the memory of a mean bite. It left a stitch that marred. Anger like pride makes one blind if not deaf to agony. But I cared for him just the same, as one would, blind with love, to the likes of him.
So this is about November. My dog November who died today. The last time I saw him wag his tail, he was on the piano, playing Chopin. Now he lay beneath it in rigor mortis, arms jerked up, tongue out, eyes staring out into space. Neither lost nor left but died. Imagining empty days without him is like life without love. All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday. Outside the night grows a shade darker. The sun will rise tomorrow as today, but this time without November.
Oh, if he only knew of love.
“Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?”
–W. Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury
December 28, 2:30 a.m.
To write! It means the lengthy dreaming before the spotless sheet; the unconscious scribbling, and the idle play of the pen as it circles round and round a blot, and nibbles and scratches at the inaccurate word, till it is bristling with tiny darts, ornamented with feelers and legs, and finally, losing its legible word-from, becomes transformed into a grotesque insect, and as rapidly converted into a fairy butterfly.
