Afreen Zara

I wanted to scar a girl this Halloween.

I put down my face paint and make haste with the rest of my makeup as I adorn a pair of loose trousers and a simple black shirt, keeping your signature disheveled hair in a bun.I leave the house with a sleek silver chain around my neck and, under my sleeves, a treasury full of words I don’t mean, promises I won’t keep, and to tie the knot, specious poems for my naive girl.I double-check in my rearview mirror as I repeat the story I shall make her live.

We shall chat through the early hours of the morning.I will talk her through my family line and go on and on about my mother, as she, just like me, rambles about her father and her siblings.I’ll tell her my mother thinks I’m a disappointment in-between our long debates on who’s better:Kafka or Dostoyevsky.She’ll tell me what I told you “Fuck what they think”,as she reads through my poems like I did yours.I’ll show her the void that beats in place of my heart as she fills it up with her light.I will look at her as you looked at me, watching for the glimpse of dawning realisation she believes she’s found.She will meet my eyes, unwavering, thinking she saw what I saw in you.

For those few weeks,I will send her all those good-morning and good-night texts.I will tell her she’s the fairest of them all as I watch her bake her vanilla depression cake, bickering about my mum, whom she thinks she’ll meet in the distant future.“Touché,”I hear the echo of your favourite word in my head.I will laugh hard at all her jokes about sky daddy and his flaws, adding a few of your cheeky ones to our conversation, wondering how the heck we are so similar.I will pin her thoughts as my bio while she texts through an english class she was better off not missing.

Listening to love songs I tell her she reminds me of, I’ll grin as she gets caught laughing.I wonder if her teacher believes it’s the pleasure of learning idioms that has got her all giddy.I’ll paint her a picture of all my quirky hobbies- your hobbies- as I read through the paragraphs she will send me,our tale taking an insidious turn.

In the blink of an eye, the truth she thought she saw in my eyes will no longer matter.I will scream at her,call her crazy,tell her I didn’t know any better.I didn’t know any better even as I told her she was extraordinary, an extraordinary fit for me.I’ll tell her I was forced into this, even as I read through her letters expressing concern over my declining health, each a page long, just like mine were.She will stare up at me, her eyes rattled and glossy, unable to believe that this was the woman who told her a fortnight ago that she was ‘all I was looking for’. Unable to believe it, just as I was unable to believe that you were the person willing to do whatever it took to keep me.

On the wednesday I break her, ‘were’ will ring through her mind, just as it rang through mine, alongside fragments of disgust and desperation to somehow keep what was left alive.But she knows, just as I did that it was too late.I step out of the car with ease to pick her up.

This Halloween, I am dressed up as you.