Trigger warnings: Suicide, Suicidal Ideation.

Cream 

Lovette slid into the empty chair beside Wazila and folded up her legs in it. 

“Older.” She responded to Amil. “Layla, abi?” She turned towards Wazila for confirmation. 

Wazila looked away from her computer and turned, quizzically, to face her. The day had officially become stranger. Her boss hadn’t sat so close to her since their incident a few weeks back. Before then, unlike Amil, Lovette always had a smile for her. She always wrapped manicured nails around Wazila’s hands and squeezed them when they were saying goodbye to each other. She always asked her how her weekend went. When Wazila was in love with her, Lovette made early mornings the best time of the day. Some weeks she would wake up as early as 4am to be the first person in the office. Lovette was always the second person. If Wazila timed it right then they could have a full hour of conversation before the third person showed up. The very last time the two of them found themselves in the office alone though, it had been a mistake. 

Wazila had spent the night in a hospital close by. She couldn’t remember all the details but she remembered her sister crying in a corner of the room and holding on to a piece of paper that had Wazila’s wiry handwriting on it. She remembered trying to say hello and feeling like there was sand in her windpipe. She remembered looking down and tracing, with her eyes, the three gashes from her wrist halfway to her elbow. When Layla spotted her blinking she stood up in what Wazila remembered was a whirlwind of blue cloth, and reached for her neck to strangle her. Wazila didn’t scream or fight. One moment manicured nails were wrapped around her throat restricting her breathing, and the next moment Layla was across the room again, this time restrained by a nurse half her size. 

“You are a coward.” Layla shouted from where she stood. She spat at Wazila. “You can’t wait until the day God wants you to die? Really?”

At that point the nurse had started screaming for reinforcements but Layla’s voice was louder.

“Are you mocking me, Wazila? How dare you! So you even had time to write a note. Look!” She turned the paper towards the nurse, “her handwriting is even neat. Do you know the rubbish she wrote here?” Her voice turned mocking as she read from the paper. “I have decided to make your life easier by-” the words were lost to the sound of two other nurses barging into the space to hold Layla’s arm and pull her out of the room. 

“If anyone could save me it would have been you.” Layla shouted the final line as she was dragged through the door. “Copy copy! At least write something original!”

Wazila remembered feeling a deep sense of shame. Not necessarily because she was in a hospital bed, alive despite her best efforts, but because her attempt to die had ended up being so anticlimactic. She had wanted to make it, like everything else in her life, a spectacle. She even tried to make her note poetic, borrowing words from her father’s suicide note. 

Dear Layla, I have decided to make your life easier by giving you my big freezer. Inside there’s some leftover jollof rice from your last visit, efo riro, and that nasty chocolate ice cream you eat. I know you hate poetry, but at least here let me say that I think my life is like ice cream. I think I came into this world as something that was supposed to soothe people and make days easier. But instead I went out into the sun and melted and I have stained everything I’ve ever loved. I am angry with you, Layla. You’ve had a fruitful life. You could be the one to find my body and take me to the hospital and clean up the blood from the floor, and you’d still have a fruitful life. You’re too smart to sit in anything as stagnant as grief. You’d find ways to grow around it. I wish I was better. Or I wish you were worse. I wish for both things. I didn’t want to die with all these heavy feelings of anger. I want to die free. Or I want to die and enter freedom. But I still find myself bound to this anger. How is it that we fell from the same tree and my fruit is so rotten? How come no one ever stuck their thumb into my centre and peeled back my rinds and seen that I was sweet inside. You stopped thinking I was sweet inside. And you were the last thing in this whole world that I believed was completely good. But for all your goodness I am still writing this. I am still going to leave you. I wish you were worse so that the leaving would be easier. But I will go, because if anyone could save me it would have been you. Now I know that no one ever will. 

Still reeling from Layla’s attempted strangulation, Wazila had made her way over to work, quietly singing along to the songs coming from her car radio. She checked the time and frowned. It was only 7:15am. At her desk she pulled out crayons, an 80 leaf notebook, and a dark blue pen. She began drafting her next suicide letter, deciding that she would add pictures for Layla this time around. She was rattled out of her sketching by the sound of someone coming up the stairs. 

“Wazila?” Lovette asked as she landed on the top step. “What are you doing here?” 

Wazila closed the book, concentrating on keeping her movements slow and - what she hoped was- unsuspicious. Her body still felt like it wasn’t completely in her control.  

“I was in the area running an errand so I just,” Wazila shrugged without completing her sentence. 

“Have you had anything to eat?”

Wazila shook her head.

“To drink at least? Milo? Coffee?”

Wazila shook her head again. 

“Oya oya oya.” Lovette bounded towards her and started dragging her chair backwards to get her to stand. In the commotion, Wazila forgot to close her notebook. She watched Lovette’s eyes widen slowly then narrow as her eyes went over the page. They were both silent as Wazila tucked the notebook, pen, and crayons back into her bag and stood up. 

In the kitchen Wazila watched as Lovette pulled out bread, eggs, cutlery, and spices from various cupboards. 

“Wazila, can I ask you something?” Lovette started. 

Wazila held her breath ready to hear it. She was prepared in a way she hadn’t been the first time someone had asked what was wrong with her. Back then, she didn’t know that there was a right and wrong answer. She didn’t know better than to be honest. She had told the person who asked- her father’s friend Farouq- to put his hand on her chest and listen for her heartbeat. She nodded when he pulled his hand away with confusion laced across his features. 

“Like my dad’s!” She had explained.

Just like her father, she had a heartbeat that was hard to understand. It would thump without a set rhyme or reason, it would knock against her ribcage with no real enthusiasm, and sometimes, for no reason at all, it would stop. Or at least it would get so quiet she would feel like it had stopped. It was somewhat of a game between her and her dad. They would take turns pressing their ears against each other’s chests, bursting into laughter every time they heard something move. In his last days that no one knew were his last days, he stopped laughing as loud. Wazila, at 6, had crawled into his lap and nestled her ear against his chest. She lay there for what felt like hours without feeling anything move. Eventually he sighed and coaxed her off his legs. 

“Wazi baby, can you get me some palm wine please?”

She protested by falling to the floor in a fit because there had never been a time where she didn’t want everything she did to be a spectacle. 

“If you bring it for me, I’ll let you have some.” He counter-offered. 

She immediately picked herself up and ran into the kitchen. She poured the palm wine into his favourite glass cup, the one she knew he reserved only for special occasions. She snaked her way outside again, using two hands to hold onto the cup. When she was just moments away from her dad, the glass slipped out of her fingers and onto the concrete. She didn’t start crying for a full minute after as she watched the white liquid soak into the ground. When she bent to begin picking up the pieces her father waved her over and lifted her into his lap again. 

“It’s okay.” He soothed. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.” 

“But it’s broken.” She sniffled. “And it’s your favourite glass.”

“You know what your name means, don’t you?”

She nodded slowly, tears still streaming down her face. 

“Then you know that that’s nothing. That’s a cup.” Suddenly he stood up, lifting them off his seat. He spun them both around and threw her into the air twice. “This is the glass I don’t want to break.” He said into her stomach, half laughing half panting. She giggled and pushed his head away. He brought them down slowly and this time nestled his ear against her chest. 

“Hm,” he smiled, “something moved.” 

She laughed and pushed his head away, pressing her ear to his chest in return. She pulled away and frowned. 

“There’s still nothing there.” She said,

Her dad smoothed his hand over his solar plexus as if checking for himself. He pulled back her head slowly, running his fingers through her plaits. 

“Keep listening.” He said. “Keep listening.” He repeated. “It’s coming.”

Of course, it never did, and Wazila had spent the rest of her life chasing that silence. What she had told Farouq, what she had told everyone who had ever asked, and what she would tell Lovette in just a moment, is that she missed her father. She hated her heart for its unrelenting beating. She hated blood flowing through atriums and valves. She hated oxygen running through pulmonary veins. She spent her life rushing into arms hoping they would hold her. Hoping they would lift her up from her knees. Hoping they would forgive her every mistake. She spent her whole life trying to be 6 years old and precious to somebody again. She had spent her whole life trying to return to that kind of love. When people would ask, in that slow and measured tone, what was wrong, she never said that she craved the feeling of an index finger tracing her scalp, or that she wanted to hear someone call her ‘Wazi baby’ in a baritone voice. One time when Layla asked she had said that she missed their father’s laugh. But it wasn’t that. Or it wasn’t just that. Saying those things made them feel inconsequential. Like just anyone could do them. Like she could survive with or without it. Like she could live with the craving and the wanting and the missing. But she couldn’t. Everytime she said that she missed her father, what she meant was that she wanted her heart to stop. She wanted to escape the noise of her life and curl up in a wide lap and press her ear against silence. She wanted to meet her father, once again, in that perfect quiet. 

“Yes, you can ask me anything.” Wazila had responded, bracing herself for the next question. 

“So all this time when I’ve needed someone to design our company Christmas cards, why didn’t you volunteer?”

Wazila, upon realising that Lovette was making a joke, exhaled. 

“I’m muslim.” Wazila replied, keeping the banter going. 

“New years.” Lovette countered.

“Who gives out New Years cards?”

“Halloween?”

“Same issue.”

“Easter?”

“Again, I’m muslim.”

“Valentines day.”

“I don’t have that special someone.”

“That,” Lovette snapped her fingers like she had caught Wazila in a trap, “is not a good enough reason.”

“It is to me,” Wazila raised then dropped her shoulders, “If I’m not getting red roses and chocolate and a card, nobody should.”

“You didn’t strike me as the romantic kind. Or the vengeful kind for that matter.”

“Well. I’m both.”

“Noted.” Lovette laughed. “Well then, remind me to pick up flowers for you on the 14th.”

“It will take more than that to get me to design the company cards.”

“I know,” Lovette smiled, “that’s why I’m making you breakfast.” She reached over to where Wazila’s hand was and squeezed it. 

Lovette had held her like this a hundred times before. She’d said things that made Wazila’s head feel like it was spinning on an axis. They’d been close before. But never this close. The only thing Wazila remembered about the moments that followed were that they were wholly terrifying. She had never felt, as so many described, the rest of the world disappearing when you look at someone. In fact she felt the opposite. When she looked at Lovette then, Wazila could see the fraying on her jean jacket, the brown stain on the corner of the kitchen counter, and the ‘turn this off after use’ sign above the microwave written in Comic Sans MS font. Whenever she looked at Lovette, Wazila saw the world in technicolour. She saw the world in detail and in wider-picture. Being with Lovette then, she wanted to make her father wait wherever he was. She would still join him, but just not then. She wanted to save the petals from the red roses Lovette would buy her and add them to her tea. She wanted to study the pattern of Lovette’s lilac nails pressed against the bones in her fingers. She would go, but after just one more of Lovette’s smiles. 

Because there it was finally. Someone who could hold the full weight of Wazila in her arms. Someone who could lift her head up and coax away her tears. Someone who would forgive her for hating the world, and for all her attempts to leave it. Lovette had leaned forward, never loosening her grip on Wazila’s hand, and all Wazila had to do was stay still. All she had to do was let herself be loved. All she had to do was meet Lovette in the silence. But the stillness, the love, and the quiet, all belonged to a Wazila that didn’t know what grief was. And maybe that’s what Wazila wanted to return to more than anything else. Something she recognised. Maybe she didn’t want her father, maybe she just wanted someone else who understood how miserable the world could be. Maybe she didn’t want silence and anything as pure as peace, maybe she just wanted the emptiness of quiet. Maybe she didn’t want love, maybe she just wanted something she could lose.

“Lovette,” Wazila had whispered, then leaned away, “the breakfast is burning.”