I died from rage.
I won’t lie, it started because I wanted to punish the magician. I wanted his nightmares to do what they do best, trigger the bogeyman of fear that keeps him trapped in his head, set off that churning of guilt and shame—yes, you’re so broken that you ruin everyone else’s life. Yes, you drove the person you love to this mad dance in a hotel room, pouring a cocktail into a low, wide glass when they’ve been sober for seven years, playing Amadou and Mariam from a phone propped in another glass so the sound reverberates, tinny and shrill, “Sabali” on an eternal loop, greasing open the gates of death so we can finally walk through. I wanted to hurt him, but he’s not who I was angry at, not really. Yes, there was pain and there was grief, but rage was the thing forcing the gates open. How many times? How many times were the gods, all of you, my deityparents and siblings, how many times were you all going to make me suffer in this useless fucking flesh and then forbid me to leave it? How dare you. How dare you keep me from home. How dare you assume that I would always be compliant, obedient, that I would stay like a fucking dog because you told me to. I am a god, too, you know, I am madness itself.
I’d spent so much of my life being good, the good child, the good incarnation, doing what I was supposed to do, which was obey and live. I wanted to be soft; I thought you all would spare me if I became soft and tender the way you made me. Instead I was left gutted, bleeding, turned into an altar, because it’s never enough for you, is it?
It’s such a human thing to think this was between me and the magician. It never is. I don’t waste my grudges on flesh.
So. I decided to be defiant, and I used my rage at the magician to unlock a deeper fury, a fury I didn’t think I was allowed to feel, a spit in the face of God fury, a rebellious well you think you can keep me here against my will, I will make—for the first time ever—a good-faith attempt to destroy the vessel you tossed me into type of fury. I knew there could be no wavering. This would be no bluff; you cannot bluff against God. If I decided to do this, I knew the kind of magic I would have to weave to execute it. Death is a difficult spell when you turn it inward.
First, everything has to become unreal. You have to kill the world around you so it doesn’t interfere. You can’t afford to think about how your little sister will feel when she finds out she’s alone now, how your human mother will crack when she knows she failed to keep you alive, how it’s not just the magician’s fears you will be bringing to life by dying. These are distracting thoughts; they will sabotage the work you’re trying to do. So everyone has to disappear, there is nothing except the room and the music and the rest of reality bleeds into emptiness.
This is strong magic, to destroy an entire world so you can be free enough to destroy a body.
I do it sober. The cocktail I drink is merely to welcome the pills rattling in a glass, orange and green and teal and white, like a bowl of candy waiting to stop a heart. I can induce a trance without anything; I don’t need substances. This is just worldbending pulled into tight focus, it only needs concentration to hold everything steady as I drink mouthfuls of pills with a bottle of orange juice. I stand on the couch and press my hands to the glass of the hotel window. The Hollywood sign shows up against the hills. I dance through the room; I have had a good life. I am going home. The song loops and loops, the words are in French and Wolof. I know it is a message from the brothersisters, I can feel when they’re sending songs—calling me stubborn, telling me to be strong. I wonder what this one is. I look up the translated lyrics; they are singing about patience, how the world is for amusement, how we came to have fun. They are sending me kisses and calling me baby and I know I should bend. I know I should listen to my siblings warning me that I am here for life, that we are here for life, but I’m just mad that they’re trying to stop me. I don’t even care that they’re doing it gently. If I was sad, maybe it would have worked, but I am enraged, and I have decided and I am stubborn, so I will finish this thing I have started. I start dancing again.
I dance until all the pills are gone. I wish I could say I thought of you, Yshwa, but I didn’t. You weren’t part of that world I was making. I thought of my papa, the Baron, as if I could force his hand with this grave. I am not despairing. I am not hopeless. I am furious and if you all love this body so much, fuck you. Fuck you for putting me in it. Fuck you for asking me to endure this much torture. Who told you a human life was worth this, it is nonsense, rubbish, I am trying to throw it away. None of you should have brought me here. I change into my favorite pajamas: pink trousers and a wraparound tunic top, green foliage drifting across them. I want to look good when they find me. When Ann finds me. The world wavers at that thought, but I reinforce it. Ann is not human. She will know why I had to leave. I hope someone else finds the body, a stranger. It doesn’t matter who finds it, I won’t be here anymore. I let go of all time that stretches beyond this and now. I get into bed and start reading a book, waiting for unconsciousness to come and collect me.
I make it through a chapter before I can feel the heaviness stalking through my limbs, the grams of medication I took doing their work in my bloodstream, in my brain, in my gut and heart. I have always wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. Now, it’s here and I am ready. I turn off the light and snuggle into the hotel bed, my eyes closing, oblivion wrapping kind arms around me. Everything dissolves and I am gone. That is how I died.
Three hours later, I woke up.
Now, I want to ask how it was for you on the third day, Yshwa. How did your body feel? I had to pee; it was my body that woke me up. I stumbled to the bathroom, and afterward I lay down again and thought things through. Has anyone ever asked you what happened in the cave before they rolled back the stone? Did you take a moment to yourself, to run an account of how your body was beating when it shouldn’t have been? Did you talk to God? I didn’t. I knew I had failed; I knew that a reckoning was coming and that it was coming quickly. I called Ann and told her what happened, then called Alex. I got dressed to go to the emergency room. My speech was slurred. It had been long enough for the drugs to soak into my system; what was done could not be undone. I packed my phone chargers and told Tamara what had happened. Later, she said I was so calm that it took her a long time to realize I was in the middle of the crisis, not the aftermath. The Uber took a long time to come. I swayed in front of the hotel like the top of a palm tree. I made small talk with the Uber driver—hilarious, I thought, for someone who was either dying or coming back to life. I couldn’t stand in the emergency room. They made me fill out forms.
Ann met me there and it was my first time seeing her new haircut. It’s gorgeous on her. The nurse called me in and helped me into a wheelchair when I started collapsing.
We stayed in the hospital for twenty hours. Ann helped me in the bathroom. My arms started convulsing and didn’t stop for four weeks. I could control it if I focused, like most things in this reality. I threw up a few times. I became short of breath and they tried to put an albuterol mask on me, but it made me throw up again and hyperventilate. So many people came in and out. Time bent. There were IVs and blood and potassium tablets. It was too late to pump my stomach. They tried to transfer me to inpatient care, but Ann and I bent the world until eight hours later, the on-call psychiatrist came in and discharged me. He was a lovely German man. No one thought he would let me go. That is a different letter—about humans and institutions and violences from people who love me, because they are afraid of things I am not afraid of. My life doesn’t belong to any of them.
I complained to Ann about how we could’ve been shopping, going to Little India or the pottery place, and she pointed out that God was grounding me. The message was clear, Yshwa, I received it well. I am not allowed to die. I can try as much as I want, but it will always end like this, having to fight humans for my freedom, my body thrown into their hands, and that is a terrible punishment in and of itself. Everyone was there telling a story of me being broken and fragile. They don’t understand the rage that came with it. They don’t understand that it’s just a fucking life. Before this, I would have said that it was mine to do with as I wished, but I learn lessons well. It’s not mine; I just have custody for now, for this lifetime. It’s God’s, and if God says I can’t throw it away, then I can’t throw it away. I felt relieved afterward. I apologized to the loved ones who were hurt, but if I could go back, Yshwa, I would absolutely die all over again. Would you?
I needed to be that angry. I needed to try. You cannot be truly submissive with a low and furious resentment rotting deep in your heart, buried by performances of obedience and the meek quiet of a good subject. Even you: you shouted when you were on the cross, you shouted against God. I needed to scream beyond voice, to defy heaven and the deityparents, to flail and tear the vessel apart from the inside out. Heaving in the aftermath, I could hear God’s voice, patient and wry: “Are you done now?”
You can call it a tantrum if you want.
I did get it out of my system, violently and under medical supervision. The day after, I was high and manic, clarity blazing through me like an angel’s sword. I tried to explain how it felt to lie down and meet darkness, expecting to die, the surrender of that. I’ve never given myself over so completely. I’ve always fought it—called for help, told someone, followed the rules to stay alive. This time, I was giving up a life, sacrificing everything that everyone said I had or would have. I put myself on the altar and used myself as the knife, there was no intercession of a ram, the offering was not stopped. And yes, it was done out of rage and spite, but to return a life to God is to return a life to God: it takes effort, it takes commitment. It’s hardly surprising that an offering made with that kind of intent would be thrown right back in my face, but my point is that I lay down to die and I woke up.
You know, Yshwa, but I don’t think many of the humans understood how freeing that was. I’d lived so much of my life with the reaper’s blade hovering over my neck, longing for death and fearing it in equal measure. I flirted with pills and overdoses, afraid they would work, afraid they wouldn’t. That evening, I faced the largest threat to my life and I tried to lose. I threw myself against the blade, faced Death in the ring and didn’t fight. I embraced it and pressed my soul against its robes. Take me, I commanded, cut away the flesh. I did all that and I lived.
I lived.
Was I ever really in danger in the ring? I was suffering, to be sure. I begged Death enough times to make it end. But this time it wasn’t me surrendering with a bent neck, moving my hair away from my spine in defeat; this time Death had to throw me off and I realize that it has never been allowed to reap me. How can you die if the Baron won’t dig your grave, if Ala won’t swallow you down, if God commands that you live? So. I lived and I will live. How reckless I intend to be, how unafraid. I slept with death creeping in my veins and I woke up. Nothing can stop me if death cannot.
They should all be afraid of what I can do now, Yshwa, I have nothing left to fear.
On the second morning, I packed up to leave for the airport. I had never seen my face so pale. I wondered if it was the hotel mirror, the brilliance of the inset light, but no, there was chalk under my skin and darkness bruised beneath my eyes. Did you look like this when you resurrected, Yshwa? Or were you bright before you disappeared? Your body only needed to be animated briefly, and then you left. I wonder if it would have been different if you’d still had a lifetime left, if you needed to keep the body for that long.
A week later, I stepped out of my car and collapsed in the driveway of the godhouse. My arm convulsed for weeks—the body glitching from its proximity to death. I am regenerating, healing the vessel from the violence it experienced, from the violence of existing, the first and myriad violences that tremble through it.
I am ready to be obedient. I have no resentment against God left; there is such peace in surrendering to a will that is so much greater than yours, relief in rebelling so fiercely and being quashed so thoroughly. I am a good soldier, despite my brattiness. Did you feel like a soldier? You were sent, you had a mission, you were even disguised in flesh. You followed your orders to the death and beyond.
How do you live after you die? Like a haunting or like a second life? If you were a thing that was born to die, then you were a dead thing even in your first life. Can the people around you tell that you are even more dead now than you were before? Can they see the ways you’ve changed, how being taken this far away from them contaminates you with distance even after you return? I was so unseen before; I cannot imagine how much more unseen I will be now, in what directions my heart will break again. It doesn’t matter. I am a good soldier.
I am ready to be obedient.