The Death of Vivek Oji

Some people can't see softness without wanting to hurt it

I'm not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn't have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn't even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?

Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.

If nobody sees you, are you still there?

Alone is a feeling you can get used to, and it's hard to believe in a better alternative.

Ikept the book for the title, for how it was spelled. Beautyful. I had no idea why that spelling was chosen, but I liked it because it kept the beauty intact. It wasn’t swallowed, killed off with an i to make a whole new word. It was solid; it was still there, so much of it that it couldn’t fit into a new word, so much fullness. You got a better sense of exactly what was causing that fullness. Beauty. I wanted to be as whole as that word.

How much of my mother's life I missed because I was a child

Love and guilt sometimes taste the same, you know.

He didn't belong to you...You keep talking as if he belonged to you, just because you were his mother, but he didn't. He didn't belong to anybody but himself.

Fresh starts were good; that separateness was where you could feel yourself, where you could learn who you were apart from everyone else.

I often wonder if I died in the best possible way - in the arms of the one who loved me the most, wearing a skin that was true.

His grief was chasing him from room to room, begging him to spend some time alone with it.

Maybe we were all pretending to be fine because the world gave us no other option.

Life was like being dragged through concrete in circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my unwilling body. As a child, I was light. It didn’t matter too much; I slid through it, and maybe it even felt like a game, like I was just playing in mud, like nothing about that slipperiness would ever change, not really. But then I got bigger and it started drying on me and eventually I turned into an uneven block, chipping and sparking on the hard ground, tearing off into painful chunks. I wanted to stay empty, like the eagle in the proverb, left to perch, my bones filled with air pockets, but heaviness found me and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t shake it off; I couldn’t transform it, evaporate or melt it. It was distinct from me, but it hooked itself into my body like a parasite. I couldn’t figure out if something was wrong with me or if this was just my life—if this was just how people felt, like concrete was dragging their flesh off their bones.

You are crying,” she said. It was only then that Osita noticed the tears slipping into his ears. It was evening and the light was leaving. “It’s raining,” he told her, slurring his words. She laughed. “It’s not raining.” “It’s raining inside me,” he said and a wave if darkness took over.

He was so beautiful that he made the air around him dull

What do you do when you’re not allowed to be angry at God?

If this story was a stack of photographs—the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country— it would start with Vivek’s father, Chika. The first print would be of him riding a bus to the village to visit his mother; it would show him dangling an arm out of the window, feeling the air push against his face and the breeze entering his smile.

If you didn't tell other people, was it real or was it just something the two of you were telling yourselves?

When you’ve stood on ground and known your child’s bones are rotting beneath you, rage and ego fade like dust in a strong wind.

Hold my life for me.

You know what’s been happening in your head. You’re the only person who knows. So ask yourself if it feels right, and somewhere, deep inside of you, there’s a compass that will tell you whether you’re right or wrong.” I

Panic was a vulture inside my body, trying to get out, pecking and flapping wildly at me.

I would say it was too late, but time has stopped meaning what it used to. I don’t mind anymore. I see how things work now, from this side. I was born and I died. I will come back. Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.

He smelled like grass and wind and clothes that had been dried in the sun.

I felt like I was always running just a few steps ahead of them, holding secrets they couldn't catch up to.

When it was dawn, just the earliest part of it, the cracks in an eggshell before it splinters open.

They were keeping me alive in the sweetest way they knew how, you see.

It was how he always did nowadays, pushing her aside gently, not listening to her. Sometimes it felt like he had stopped listening to her years ago, and she just hadn't noticed. Live they were living in two separate worlds that happened to be under the same roof, pressed against each other, but never spilling, never overlapping.

You can chase the truth, but who could avoid the moment of hesitation when you wonder if you really want what you’ve been asking for? Kavita knew that what the