#scurf162: A Year of Deaths

Holding place for all lost souls

A painting by Deepti Naval that has been doing the rounds on hellsite aka X lately.

Living through all of 2023 has been like skipping, hopping and jumping around the gloaming horror of life. The fact that I’ve made it to the 364th day superficially alive and still a little bit jaunty, is a miracle.

Pauses, balms and salves came in all forms. There was the return of chai and smokes. People became a blanket too. As did music, reading, writing and just disappearing. Just like the good old times, when people weren’t dropping dead all the time.

Where is the fun in that you say?

End of October this year a first cousin died in a freak road accident. His going has still not left me. I don’t think the dead ever leave you in that way. His death was the third in just my father’s side of the family this year. Between end of March and end of October we lost three emotional giants from our family. Nope, I wasn’t emotionally close with any of them. Quite the contrary, tbt. But I had known them and they had known me. We had shared warm rooms, slippery evenings and slick noons.

This kind of dying of closed ones, suddenly, together kind of leaves you sick, parched. Everyday since the last passing, in a way I’ve been waiting for the phone to ring and my mom deliver to me the news of yet another someone moving on. Till today I wake up in the morning thinking of death. Of someone leaving suddenly. Most nights I don’t get any sleep at all.

Do these turns in life make me a better person? Nope. Have they altered the way I deal with the ones I love? Still a loud resounding no. But this END OF YEAR (FASK OFF) newsletter is just a place to hold them close to me (???). A placeholder for the departed of which we have probably lost count of in this living. What with the various unending wars, the conflicts, the tearing apart of whatever last shred of humanity has remained to be.

I’ve been meaning to write this newsletter for over a week. But each time I’ve sat on my desk and started to purr out some pretty poetic paisley words, it had all felt like a bourgeois mockery of everything around. Until I read a dispatch by a certain someone and a song they (I believe) sent me. Spurred on by the heaviness of the song I jumped onto the blank canvas of Scurf.

Remain in Me

No, I am not naïve enough to blankly wish for these differences to whittle themselves down. The bleak has always found a way to coexist with the silvery shininess, but somehow, just humanly somehow this year we managed to push out even that last shred of humanness. So congrats to all of us on that!

I reserve the last of my fervour for the ones who continue this living without pausing the doomscrolling (lol), breaking for a smoke and reflecting on how far down we’ve pushed ourselves in the gutter called modern life! So with our 5G internets and our multimillion dollar movie minting industries, we should all pat ourselves on the back and make our way forward into what might look like the future but is clearly a far, far cry from it.

Also, hey! Wish us all such a mirthful prosperous new year ✨✨