“…And so I cry sometimes when I’m lying in bed. Just to get it all out what’s in my head.”

– 4 Non Blondes

I once had a rose, both literally and figuratively. Her name was Rose, and she was a rose. We had the kind of love that made mothers and fathers sleep with their backs turned and also made brothers sit in deafening silence during dinner. At that time, she was 18, and I was 16. She looked like an edible flower – a thing the mind wouldn’t instinctively want to indulge in, but at some point, I found myself intricately separating each of her petals, foraging for nectar. Our love was our little secret, something like keeping an egg away from the crows and keeping it warm until it hatched. Our love could also be likened to childrens’ relationship with candy:

For the disallowance only fuels the desire,

and the temptation grows stronger, with a flame that will not tire.

*

Things began to change the first time I heard a darkness in her voice. I can’t really explain it, but it sounded as if her tongue had turned into a bow, and she aimed but never released the arrow, and I stood as the target, impatiently waiting for it to pierce right through my skull. I never thought it was possible to hear darkness, but that day, I did. It was a summer night by the edge of the city, away from its neverending noise and clutter. We lay on the grass under the star-filled sky. The air was warm, but not uncomfortably so, and a gentle breeze could be felt. The sky was perfectly black, the stars twinkled brightly, and the moon cast a soft glow over the landscape. Like classic Chinese paintings, we were the stoics in the background, not the main focus. It would take developed eyes to see us. 

We listened as the crickets made soft music for us. As we lay under that blanket of distant light, I wondered what the stars saw when they looked down at us. 

Rose turned to look at me, searching for my eyes in the little light around us. I took a handful of her hair, massaging her scalp as I looked at her face, noticing how more defined her jawline had become and how sunken her cheeks were as well. I traced her jawline with my fingers until it began to move.

“What will happen to us?” Rose asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Are we going to grow old without the world ever knowing that we have loved each other?”

“We have?” That was my attempt to divert her attention from the matter at hand.

“That we love each other. We should tell our parents. It’s time.”

“I thought you knew where I stand on this issue…”

“Yeah, but I’m tired of hiding. I want something more.” She sighed and looked away.

“We aren’t hiding. We are protecting our eggs, remember?”

As the night progressed, we entertained conversations about names we would call our future kids and pets and about nothing at all. In her silence, I was whole, but my mind remained on the thing in my bones – it was mine, ours, and I did not want anyone else to know about it, but she, on the other hand, sought freedom. 

*

Rendezvous

One day as I sat in my room, tired, and drowning in books for my final exams, isolated and disconnected from things that were familiar to me, I smelt the aroma from Mama’s kitchen as she opened my door.

“There’s someone outside for you.”

“Who?”

“The girl who recently moved opposite our house.”

I closed my books and went outside. Rose stood on the veranda. I don’t remember what she was wearing, but what struck me were her lively eyes, looking as if they’d never encountered darkness, and her warm, inviting gaze. 

“Hi,” I said, unsure of the most appropriate way to greet her, a hug or a handshake. Neither seemed to work, so I just stood there, bare.

“Hi.”

“We can go inside if you want.”

“No, this will do.” 

I could sense her softness and delicacy with each word she uttered. Her words flowed naturally, never forced. 

The first time I saw her she and her family were moving in, and after that, for days and months to come, I would only see her in her yard, cleaning her mama’s car, raking the leaves.

“I was wondering if you would like to be friends,” she said facing down as if she was ashamed.

“Yes, of course,” I said, trying to gauge her expression, make her look at me. I gave up and looked forward to the wall. That evening, I missed dinner, but my mother also didn’t call me in to eat. I sat with Rose and exchanged words about school, friends, family, likes, and dislikes. That was the day I learned about the thing in her bones too.

*

With her, I lost and found myself. I snuck into her yard like a thief. At first, the dogs would bark at me, but they soon learned to nod at me when I entered the house, usually when her mother was not around. We spent the nights watching something on her TV, but after a while, I found myself being parted by her, trying not to send her mother’s roof flying into the air with my screams.

I watched as Mother’s comments on our friendship turned from: “She’s such a good friend,” with delight and approval accompanying her words, to: “You should give each other space to study,” her tone laced with distance. Her eyes were on mine but focused on the distance between, as if she was contemplating something else. Then she looked away as if she worried for a second that I could see her thoughts. The day she uttered those words, as we sat at the dinner table, my father asked me about my books, which he hadn’t done in a long time. 

“We want nothing short of a lawyer. I hope you remember that,” he said with a hint of roughness in his voice. 

“Yes,” I said.

“And that friend of yours, what does she do?”

“She’s to do medicine,” I said, wondering why he asked me as if he did not know.

“Medicine and law do not mix. Find friends who are doing the same thing as you, okay?”

He looked at my mum. She did not reciprocate his gaze. She looked at me and smiled, but I remember that the skin around her eyes did not fold and wrinkle.

I looked at my plate, my stomach suddenly full. I began to notice everything about that dish, from the plate itself – I tried measuring the circumference with my eyes and scrutinised the yellow, white, and brown fibres in my white pap – to the bubbles that settled around in my glass of Sprite. I could hear each bubble shimmer and rise above to burst and release air. I felt the air dart and sting my cheeks.

“Your food…” my mother said, looking at her own plate.

I looked at my plate and began eating, forcing the food down my oesophagus, but something was sitting in the pit of my stomach, and I wondered what Rose’s dinner time was like. I wondered if she felt the lump I felt in my throat or the brick I felt in my stomach, night after night, just to get through dinner. But on one of the finer nights, my father’s discord finally broke into a deafening cacophony of rage. 

Voices rose and fell, in a chorus of sound, but I did not hear anything as I was lost and bound. In my head, a world of my own, I could no longer hear the noise. The shouting gradually became muffled, a distant refrain as the walls of my brain protected me. My eyes were open but blank, my face a mask as my father continued to ask about the thing in my bones. I had no need to reply as I was the answer sitting right before them. The tempest of sound hailed down on me, and I remained unfazed.

The plates on the table, once orderly and neat, now lay shattered and defeated. The sound of the shattering echoed in the air, and the plates represented me and a life that was not fair. Their destruction was a scream of despair. I watched myself fall to the ground, my pieces flying into the air, one after the other. My shards littered the floor, ready to slice through feet – a testament to the anger that was no more.

The plates and I had one common denominator:

We once bragged about a life that was whole,

but now we were broken, leaving a vacuum that could never be filled.

The sound sedated me, and the next morning I woke up drowning in a bed of tears.

*

It’s in the bones.

I plucked my Rose, put it in the vase of my heart, and made sure it had enough water each morning, unaware of the inevitable matter of disease. She became even frailer and had me wondering if I was the cancer leeching on her will to live. The eyes I thought had never seen darkness became hollow, filled with dark and murky water, and I had no idea how to fix it. I wanted to reach into the dark waters of her pupils and squeeze out the very essence of the mystery shrouded within.

My heart hurt. The sensation was that of the devil slowly pushing a cold dagger into my back, sharp and intense, accompanied by a numbing and tingling. Pain so immense it ceased to be pain. I stumbled and staggered until I fell to the ground bleeding, and the devil watched me gasp for air, never took the knife out. The only words I could utter were:

Ah

Ah

Ah…

It was after she had spent a week at the doctors that I lay in bed with her, on top of her. I was wary of each move, not wanting to break her. I stopped, and we lay there, looking at the ceiling.

“I am sick,” she said, her words softly exiting her mouth.

I turned to face her and asked her what she meant.

“You’ve been in my bones, but this time it’s something else.” She sighed, and I clenched my teeth, waiting for her to continue.

“I have been diagnosed with leukaemia.”

“What?” The thing in my stomach bubbled and travelled up to my throat. I threw myself out of the blankets and threw up on the wooden floor. My body had known this confession to be sitting at the bottom of my belly, and it exited, as I groaned and choked at intervals. When I got up, I felt like I had just given birth to something, like I had freed it, but I didn’t know what.

That night I took her into my arms and saw her cry. Her tears fell like raindrops. The weight of illness bore down so strongly, but it was both hers and mine. I cried, not because of the what-ifs, but because I couldn’t bear to see the murky waters flooding her face – waters that left a trail of death.

In my arms, her body was weak, her spirit crushed, her heart in pieces, emotions hushed. I smelled her fear, but the world was oblivious to our anguish, and it continued to spin. Our future was stained and our love infected. I failed to see the light, not because I was a pessimist but because when I looked in her eyes, I could see that she had already given up… before she had even begun fighting. I could see that her soul had been in distress long before our paths had even met, but still, it pleaded for healing and a chance to rest.

It wasn’t just her body that had been compromised; her soul, a sacred ball, had been pricked and was deflating at the speed at which bacteria spreads.

Day after day, I sat at my computer, fingers hovering over the keyboard as I gazed at the screen with a mixture of fear and determination. With deep breaths, I would type ‘leukaemia’ into the search bar, and a flood of information would come pouring forth. I scoured the pages, reading articles and medical journals, absorbing every detail I could find about the disease and its treatments.

As I read, the words on the screen seemed to come alive, filling the room with a sense of dread. I became lost in the world of medical terminology. I clicked on link after link, even links I had visited already, taking notes and bookmarking pages as if the information I gathered could somehow heal my loved one. The computer screen glowed softly, a beacon of light in my dark room, as I worked tirelessly to educate myself about leukaemia. Amidst the dry facts and scientific jargon were moments of beauty too – stories of hope and resilience, of patients who had fought and won. I became a poet of knowledge, gathering information to help Rose, if I could. The web became a physical manifestation of my love.

One thing about the web, though, is that it had no answer if my Rose would make it.

*

A sign of death

One day as we sat watching TV, my skin began to crawl from the sight of maggots on the screen. I hugged myself and asked her to fast forward. I asked her why she did not share the same fear as me, and she said that it disturbed her too, but just not as badly because the world is rotten. 

“You might as well get used to the sight of maggots.”

Maggots are a sign of death, she said, so it was an understandable primal fear of mine. As long as I didn’t let the maggots dig into my skull, 

“You’ll be just fine,” she said.

Monitoring her vital signs, I watched her on the hospital bed, lying still, tubes connected to her arms. The cream blanket covering her turned into maggots that squirmed and crawled in a writhing mass. Their pale, translucent bodies glistened in the ward’s light as they twisted and climbed over each other, searching for parts of her they had not touched. 

I was hypnotised as I watched the creatures stuck in constant motion, their tiny legs skittering across her as they moved relentlessly in their pursuit of food. Their sheer numbers were overwhelming. They seemed to be multiplying with every move, right before my eyes, spreading on top of her and leaving a slick trail in their wake. They made my skin itch and crawl, their strange movements and insatiable hunger evoking a sense of revulsion and fear in me. I only got up when I saw them begin to cross over onto my hands as I cupped hers in mine. I jerked my body away and screamed. It was just a blanket. I resented her for not being afraid of death.

The room was sterile and quiet, the beeping of machines and the occasional footsteps of medical staff the only sounds. Rose had wilted. Her skin was pale, and her eyes were closed, with dark circles underneath. She looked tired and fragile. The scent of stubborn antiseptic terrorised my nose. A small table next to the bed held a vase of wilting flowers. I got up and tossed them into the bin close to the bed. Cut up flowers are for the dead, and my Rose was not dead.

*

After months, my Rose became a shadow of herself. Her disease came and went, and it was the most excruciating February. I stood under the bridge by the roadside, waiting for Rose’s parents to leave the hospital so I could get in and see her. The sky was overcast, mirroring the gloominess of my heart. People were bundled up in heavy coats, hats, gloves, and scarves, with only their eyes visible. They chattered and laughed. After that, the streets were deserted, and the only sounds were the crunching of snow underfoot and the howling of the wind. Everything was frozen solid, and the cold air made breathing difficult. The world felt desolate and abandoned, but I was aware that this was just my perception of it – without my Rose, there was no magic.

“You might be in the white man’s land, but it does not mean that you are them.”

My father’s words bounced around my head like an earworm from a terrible song I did not know the lyrics to.

I spent that evening desperately moving and deliberately shivering in an attempt to warm myself up. I kept my eyes on the street lamp that cast an orange light onto the snow. After a while, I saw Rose’s mother, sister and father exit the building, and that was when I went in. I had learned that my presence had become too burdening. They did not need to tell me; their defeated greetings and reluctant smiles had long given it away.

In the hospital room, the machines hummed and beeped, helping to further spread the fungus in her head. She lay there with her heart burdened and weakened. 

And in this moment, a goodbye was sealing our fate. I could not believe it. My ears began ringing with noises I had never heard before. Her words pierced me and tossed me into a dimension where the only thing apparent was fear.

The words came out slow, a sad refrain.

“It is time,” she said.

“Time for what?” I said, cupping her hand in mine, making her come into contact with my tears because maybe then she would understand.

There was no getting through to her as she had made up her mind. I finally understood that I, too, was a disease in her bones.

There was nothing more I could have done other than stand there with my heart bleeding in my hand. Maybe my love was too small to bear hers.

So we said goodbye with a final kiss, from me to her, filled with sorrowful bliss. It hurt me more that I left her suffocating in that room.

I could not blame her. I stood there as a representation of everything she was ceasing to be: life. I resented myself too. I wanted to be sick too so that we could spend our days together on those hospital beds, laughing and joking in the face of death. But life wouldn’t have it; one of us had to live, and it happened to be me. I did not stop visiting her though, although my presence was not always met with warmth.

That night, the cruel hand of fate sent the blade twisting in my back. I staggered to the train station with my chest freshly bleeding, and trailing the ground was my blood, blood that led back to her. I struggled to see through the streaks of light and trains that blurred past me. I could not identify the train I was to get on.. I sat at the station benches, waiting for the train to ram through me, but just when I needed it not to, it delayed. With each passing second, my vision got blurry with the tears that fought their way to my eyes, and I avoided eye contact with other people waiting for the train. A veil of sorrow fell on me like rain, obscuring my sight and causing my heart to wane. The world took on a misty hue, and my heart ached, unable to see what was true. Actually, I’m not sure if the train was really delayed. All I know is that time stopped. Everything stopped, and the only thing that was, was simply:

Misery.

*

The time 3:15 AM became my nemesis:

My phone rang, a harbinger of dread,

A piercing sound that cut through the air,

Drumming my ears.

With each ring, the brick in my stomach became heavier,

As my heart braced for news that I knew,

Déjà vu.

My hand reached out, a gesture automatic,

As if the worst could be held at bay,

But the voice of her mama brought the reality,

The maggots had eaten through the umbilical cord,

Snapped into two.

The words, though spoken in monotone,

Struck with the force of a sledgehammer blow,

Right to the fucking chest,

Bringing a world of pain and sorrow,

To a life that just moments ago was aglow.

The phone slipped from my hand, 

Floated in the air between the ground, 

And the heavens right above and,

clattered to the floor,

As my mind spun and reeled with the weight of the news,

Of a loss too great to be borne anymore,

And a heart shattered, left in atomic pieces that would explode if they came into contact again.

If my heart came into one again,

Everything would cease to exist.

This grief descended like a storm,

A tempest of pain in my heart,

My Rose, dried up,

Taken by leukaemia’s dart.

Tears fell like raindrops from heaven,

Memories flooded like an overflowing stream,

Of laughter, of love, of all that was given,

Now a precious, distant dream.

The world lost its colour and light,

Not black and white,

But everything became grey and undefined,

Sorrow wrapped me in its embrace,

For what is the worth of my life if not woven into the life of my Rose.

That night I found myself in a small underground bar where people did everything, from hardcore drugs to plain water. I sat alone. It was quiet and most of the sound came from the stereo.

Also, this is where I got a chronic earworm from a song:

“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone

It’s not warm when she’s away

Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone

And she’s always gone too long

Anytime she goes away.”

The universe has a weird and cruel way of reminding one of the things they will never have. I cannot listen to that song and not think of her, which is why I cannot move on. Each time I think I have found love, I’m afraid they can hear the song playing in my head.

Anyway, the lights were low, and I sat at the counter with nowhere to go. I wondered if the bartender could see the reflection of my torn soul and my shattered heart.

I took numerous shots of whiskey with a shaking hand, and even though I drank the bottle empty, the pain remained. Luckily, no one asked me what was wrong because if they did, where could I have possibly fucking started? I am sure I left a ghost of myself in that bar that night because the next time I woke up, I was standing at Rose’s funeral.

*sigh*

The rain fell gently, like tears from the sky. She was crying from above. She had fought, but I guess it was time. Everybody knows when it’s time, it doesn’t matter how strong one is, and that’s just that.

Her other friends and family came to pay their respects. Rose’s mother had also grown frail, and her father was a skeleton on life support. Everyone wore black, and next to me, was my friend, the only friend who had come close to understanding how much Rose meant to me. With her, I sat at the back of the proceedings.

The church stood tall and sombre, its doors open to all who mourned. The wind from the rain gushed through the church in failed attempts to soothe my heart. The pews were filled with heads bowed. We all silently made tributes to my love who had to go.

A rainbow hue was created from all the flowers that adorned her casket and everything around it. Lilies, roses, daisies, and more, were a beauty in sorrow that the heart could never restore.

I wished I could make everyone stop with the songs that echoed through the rain like a symphony of pain.

The voices rose in a vibrational chorus so terrorising. A perfect lullaby for the lost. A farewell so bitter. 

The rain continued to patter down in a mournful tune and dirt fell heavy upon the casket’s lid, sealing the fate of Rose’s body.

The casket entered the earth so dark and deep and closed the final chapter in the story of my beauty’s sleep. The earth surrounded it, like a shroud so cold, a cocoon of darkness, and all the light faded away as the casket dropped and Rose departed into nothingness.The thing in my stomach I thought I had gotten rid of returned and sent me puking on the bushes. 

*

In cemetery silence peace prevails and sorrow wails.

Rose was engulfed by the maggots that bore into her bones and ate away at her marrow. Where my Rose’s headstone stood, silence spoke louder than words. I resented her for allowing death to kill her. Her ghostly soft whispers and memories created a warm blanket around me and cocooned me. Her death had snapped the one thing that connected us, and as much as I battled to hold onto her, deep down I knew we would be separated for all eternity.

As I stood by her grave, I wished I had let her maggots crawl all over me because now I know that for our love to have survived, we needed to be baptised in the same fears first. 

I placed the red roses on top of her grave, then I proceeded to lay myself on the ground and look at the sky.

Things began to change the first time I heard a darkness in her voice. I can’t really explain it, but it sounded as if her tongue had turned into a bow, and she never released the arrow, and I stood as the target, impatiently waiting for it to pierce right through my skull. I never thought it was possible to hear darkness, but that day, I did. It was a summer night by the edge of the city, away from its neverending noise and clutter. We lay on the grass under the star-filled sky. The air was warm but not uncomfortably so, and a gentle breeze could be felt. The sky was perfectly black, and the stars twinkled brightly. The moon cast a soft glow over the landscape. We listened as the crickets made soft music for us. As we lay under that blanket of distant light, I wondered what the stars saw when they looked down at us. 

Rose turned to look at me, searching for my eyes in the little light around us. I took a handful of her hair, massaging her scalp as I looked at her face, noticing how more defined her jawline had become and how sunken her cheeks were as well. I traced her jawline with my fingers until it began to move.

“What will happen to us?” Rose asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Are we going to grow old without the world ever knowing that we have loved each other?”

“We have?” That was my attempt to divert her attention from the matter at hand.

“That we love each other. We should tell our parents. It’s time.”

“I thought you knew where I stand on this issue…”

“Yeah, but I’m tired of hiding. I want something more.” She sighed and looked away.

“We have to do it together because I’m afraid,” I said.

“I’m not as afraid, so I’ll hold your hand.”

“You’ll let your maggots crawl all over me,” I said, sobbing.

“I will.”

It turns out I had mistaken the freedom she spoke of for darkness. It was freedom all along.

*

The devil’s dagger slowly exited my back. Bleeding to death, I was free.

Lucille Sambo is a 24-year-old Zimbabwean with works that have appeared in Brittle Paper and other literary magazines.