Second Lives

1. If you are lucky, if perhaps you too are one in a million – you will get to live a second life. Your body will break, disperse, transform, approach death, dip its feet in the styx, draw back and carry on.

3. There are others like me. On their second life. My first ended in 2017, December 13. Then everything began again, changed but going on, and on. 

5. It’s 7 years later and google won’t tell me where she is or what she’s up to. I have her email but can’t think of what to say other than- me too. I got a tattoo with words too. 

7. J, I gave up writing poetry that no one would read, I now write songs that no one listens to. 

9. Like the dandelion seed caught in the tailwind of a passing car. Like the gold that glitters on the sea, that I was told was the sun just reflecting. Like the cows taking a seat right before the heavens open up. Like how you smile, when it’s not at me. Like how I watch the sunrise when I can’t find sleep. 

11. When I was 16 I told my mother I couldn’t see my future. 

13. I was diagnosed anaemic at 13 and given iron tablets. Along with other tablets for pain and clotting (mefenamic and tranexamic acid for those interested) which might as well have been sugar pills. I got up, got dressed and went to school on days that I could leave bed. On days I could not, I bled and bled and bled until I threw up with the pain. Periods were punishment. God made birthing difficult for Eve, that’s what I was taught. I inferred, as I turned the shower floor red that he made the refusal to give birth painful as well. Anyway, I left school with 74 percent attendance and at least 5 A*- C’s so no one cared. 

15. Armed with this malfunctioning flesh, I slink through crip and disabled spaces an imposter. I play disabled as I decay. Us afterlifers are reborn into the same body, the piloting takes a while to get a hang of but our spirits are unbothered by time.

17. They must sense something. They keep telling me that they will be fine. I know they will not. You can be many things in your second life, but never fine. Fine is not for us, we are simply still here. 

19. Friday 15th 2017, the new Star Wars film is released. It is disappointing but I don’t know that yet. Mum and I were excited to watch it. My eyes water because I can’t feel my torso and we had plans. I see the first faces of my new life. They ask me my name. They ask me for the date. I tell them Star Wars day, and the nurses go to find a doctor. 

21. I give L morphine sometimes. I was prescribed it so it is mine to do with what I please. They take it when things get bad. I take it hourly and still the body won’t stop screaming. 

22. So there’s another pill. Amitriptyline. 

24. I nearly called this, whatever this is, After Lives but it didn’t feel quite right. Second Lives holds testimony to the continuation, to the secondhand, to the used. 

26. I’m six years deep into my second life, and the day feels like any other. I get re-birthday messages from my family and write this while sitting on a friend’s bed. C works from home and I am welcomed to join her, tapping out my very important thoughts while she dual monitors her hours for 14 pounds a piece. 

28. In your second life every second will feel foreign. Clive James wrote a poem called Injury Time and I got it tattooed on my arm. You will feel every second of it. And those seconds will feel like years some days. 

30. I tried reading Being and Nothingness by Jean Paul Satre and had a panic attack after the first couple of pages. That probably means he was right. 

32. I got a camera that will be vintage in a couple of decades. When I record and watch back, I can see what I saw without the noise. There’s so much noise. I’m writing and listening to music. And the train is still for a moment. And the people are walking but I don’t move my bag- I can hear conversations and breaths. The train is now moving. I can hear the machinery of it. Feel the vibration. The child kicking at the back of my seat. In Nara, Japan, there was so much I couldn’t understand and I was happier for it. The noise faded, the writing too. And I could see the leaves from Kiyomizudera turn to red. 

34. After a lifetime of insisting that I am the same, that I am the same, just broken in some way. After a lifetime of demanding to be fixed, to studying the edges that my defect has caused, I have been told that I am different. That I am not the same. It is once again chronic. 

37. I am moving house and the walls are half painted. There are so many pretty words in my head- some to music- some in books and some on the fanfiction website that has fed my imagination since I was 16. I am a collector, not of things but of written sound. 

39. I told my doctor that I haven’t been taking my pills, she said I had to and I said okay. I take them some days and don’t others. “They are the only thing keeping you here,” my mum scolds. 

41. I carried too many boxes and now my lower back is numb. There’s only an issue if you become incontinent, Google says when I ask. My wrist has slowly become weaker- I’ll know if it is broken if it stops working. For now, I only halfway drop cups of tea and your hand. 

43. I started learning Korean in my first life but never finished. Sometimes we meet in back alleys and I fit ‘나는 더 행복을 자격이 있어’ more comfortably in my mouth then it ever would in English. 

45. The morphine is no longer enough, the body is impressive- finding more and more and higher and higher amounts of pain. You find that once it is everyday, it is no longer a reason to stay in bed. 

48. C told me to listen to Ethel Cain’s album last year and I said I would but didn’t. Now I play sunbleached flies on repeat- all 7 minutes 36 seconds of it just to hear the line God loves you but not enough to save you, again, and again, and again. 

50. My nephew pokes my scars when I’m not looking. I think he has made a game of it, to see how long it takes me to notice his fingers pressing into keloid knots. I cannot feel it but always make a fuss when I finally catch him at it- he laughs and runs. There is fun in the game and I am glad. 

52. I saw the boy I was in love with today. And where it usually hurt to sit across from him and drink coffee once every two years- I only felt warmth. For him, for myself, for an us that never happened- for the kids we were. He said he was staying the night in a hotel, alone, made sure to let me know he had his own room. An affair would be very grown up of me I couldn’t help but think. Recently I have been bemoaning how I’d never spent my 20s properly, wildly. An affair would be very grown up. Anyway, I loved him first. Let’s call him E- E was a musician and we took the music GCSE exam together back in that nowhere half place between Essex and London. I wonder what he thinks of me, the edges he sees that are distinctly different like I do his. The eyes are the same though and the scent, ocean sweet air and bitter salt. E is a touring musician, while I barely have made a name for myself in my city. I tell him I don’t know what I’d do if he stopped doing music- he looked at me in surprise. “It’s in your bones,” I tell him. “To me it’s who you are.” I don’t ask about his wife when I ask after his family- the question buzzing behind my teeth. “Are you gonna have kids soon?” stays locked in my gums. If we are pretending to just be old friends having coffee, that’s what I’ll do. You ask me if I’ve seen the series ‘One day’ and I say no. “I know she dies,” I tell him. He tells me it made him cry, a series that shows two people on the same day every year- sometimes together, sometimes not. “Then she dies,” he said. “I didn’t,” I think. He’s always talking in code like this- I usually cave and say the thing as it is. Not this time, I didn’t take the bait- didn’t say I didn’t die, that I just came close. Didn’t say we were never together. 

54. Everything after has felt like I’m pressing my fingertips into the soft wet earth of reality, moulding, carving a space for myself that wasn’t necessarily planned or permitted. 

56. I’ve not spoken to M since they moved away. Halfway around the world they live their life in hours of crossfit and romantic bliss with their boyfriend. There was a time I saw her more than the sun. 

58. I have been the worst person to my mother. I understand that this is not unique. I have been the best person to her as well, which I think is slightly rarer. Still, if anyone treated her like I do, I am unsure what I would do. I am not sure what life my mother is on, she is like a cat in that way- her body never worked right. I learned the condition and medication list by the time I was 6, spoke to the EMTs when she couldn’t. When I was 8 the pastor’s wife said that I should become a doctor, that I should use my knowledge for good, as if I wasn’t already. 

60. Hey M, could you have pictured we would be like this? We were so tightly nestled in each other’s souls. Butler said, “I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well” and I feel it but still don’t message or call. I blame the 9 hour time difference, 8 when the clocks save the light. I stopped going to the gym and put all that weight back on, I’m glad you’re not here to see it. 

62. I haven’t lost the thread. The only way to show a second life is to live it, do you live like I do? Do you think the same? I’ve always wanted to be ordinary and missed the mark. If you are reading this and scoff and think “there’s nothing special about you! This is self-gratified, self-pitying bullshit!” then, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

64. I don’t tell people that I am disabled but when I do, they assume it is a mental illness I am afflicted with. Which is fine, they are not entirely wrong after all, but it is hard when I am rotting from the inside out to smile and divert conversation. 

66. M says we have to meet then, in Japan. It’s only two hours by plane, she tells me. 

68. C is engaged, their partner has become a friend of mine too. Sometimes I stay in their spare room, when the 3 hour journey home is too much for the body to handle. The last time I was there I stained the sheets and mattress red. C brought me a cup of chai and a breakfast bar and told me not to worry. Hugged me. I sipped the tea and burnt my tongue while giving my best answers over zoom for the virtual interviewer. I recalled my work experience while I bled and bled and bled. 

70. Are you living well? Can you show me how?

2. In your second life air, food, water and shelter may not be enough to keep the body functioning. You may need pills, seaside walks, compresses- hot cold or heavy, sterile rooms, talks with doctors, arguments with doctors, tears with strangers, tea with mum, mobility aids, meditation, screaming fits, a meal at that one chinese hotpot, tattoos, surgery, less limbs, more hormones, just the right amount of sex, music that makes you feel, people that understand, people that understand, a good book and quiet, the stars, the rain, trash TV, good films, to be alone, to be distracted, to not remember, to not forget, to talk, to listen and yes still, to breathe.

4. I met J while I was on my first life, she was on her second. I remember her most clearly as she was, one day after class- huddled up with us, me 19 the rest 30 and beyond and her older. Winter in London was biting as always and her breath plumed grey. She gripped herself tight, and stomped her feet on the pavement. She had heels on, black ones that looked a bit like school girl shoes with a rounded toe and strap across. She had a beer with us and we were talking some poets talk before we dispersed into the underground tunnels of Holborn station. Her cheeks were flushed, the wind kissing each one red, the booze too I suppose. Earlier that evening she told us about the tattoo that hid at the base of her skull. Believe. She had a bout of breast cancer and was in remission, the tattoo came after. I found it all mesmerising at the time. Her words, the far off look in her eye.

6. I write because I have to, there’s no grand scheme to it. J wrote “It’s two thousand and four and I don’t know a soul who doesn’t feel small among the numbers” and “mistrust the pavement and your blood tests turn the doctor’s expression grave” and “Don’t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky.” 

8. I cut my teeth on reality, imagine the houses that I pass by crumbling and read, “a thing is just a slow event.” In the same book I learnt that “beauty is something that has nothing to do with you.” Now that I have left it, my first life that is, the world has nothing to do with me. 

10. Don’t make me say it, but everything is. Everything is. 

12. Back to the task at hand. 

14. In your second life it’s sometimes hard to stay grounded, if there is a matrix you are unplugged, unmoored. The body often will need help to function. Mine demands a strict regimen of pills and the suppression of my immune system. Find what yours needs and it should make things easier.

16. L is losing their kidney soon but won’t get another. They don’t know that they’re about to be born. I send them memes on instagram and mourn them as they are. I will be happy to meet them again, to learn their new edges. 

18. My first life wasn’t great. It was a study in poor black single mother household childhood homeless, how sad. Grades good skin black ugly ugly, hips girl-woman desire bitch n-word say it say it dropout burnout fat weird black black black, is that your real hair? Books secrets fanfiction music words saying saying tell me how, please please please, take this pill. Yellow eyes- finally she stopped eating! Wasting, you look good! 24 hours left rainwater mum mother forgetting, what was my fathers name? No alternative? Count back from 10, 9, 8, 7, black eyelids shut.

20. In my second life people are happy that I am still here. I am not required to do anything but be. It is hard. The boat leaks. 

23. I want to speak about other things, things that have nothing to do with me. Love. I have loved but my partners never join me on the dancefloor. I like the way Kae Tempest talks love. Their “Pennies” sneak into the rare silences. “Let’s spend the afternoon in bed/with three bottles of wine/and love the day into the night/and forget we don’t have time.” Love ever expanding- turning clock times minutes into hours and hours into Blakes’ eternities. I imagine I’m in it with my favourite celeb, I know everything about them, they are my lock screen. I whisper “Pennies,” memorise it and imagine I am whispering it to them. “Throwing looks across these crowded bars/ like pennies thrown for wishes.” And imagine that they are listening. “The same night whitening the same trees,” Neruda, “We, of that time, are no longer the same.” Mitski. All that she sings. Joni “I could drink.” Bluets. If you are reading this you should know by who, I have stolen all of this from her. 

25. L is home. They didn’t take the kidney- just reshaped it. I was surprised by the catheter strapped to their thigh. I helped them shower and washed their hair- they thank me. As I tuck them into bed I tell them how well they are doing. Tell them to rest, that they will be fine. They ask me more questions now and I share all that I know. 

27. I sit, I eat, I write and the day is easy, it might just be that every other day that is hard. 

29. I am unconcerned with things that don’t concern me. I pick up things that have nothing to do with me. I move though a world that wasn’t built for me and there is no one to be mad at but everyone and myself. Don’t ask me how to fix it, it’s not broken. It’s working as intended. 

31. It was autumn when I went to Japan, the trees were different and everything was chestnut flavoured. My brother and I wandered into an exhibition in Nara – Absolute Realism by Noda Hiroshi. My brother offered to translate the exhibiting texts but I told him no. I wanted to see without words. 

33. I don’t have a lot to say/ but I’m still talking anyway/I am the master of mistakes/I missed the point you tried to make. The song goes on but I won’t listen. Haunted by Searows. I’ll add it to my playlist. 

35. There is a name for my chronic difference but I will not give it to you, I have been reading Butler, I will keep some of myself. 

36. At a house party in a rousing game to truth or dare I was asked “What could you talk about for hours if people were interested?” I replied, “contemporaries’ interaction with different modes of time- my thesis.” To which someone replied “no.” I was confused because I hadn’t asked a question. This devolved into a 45-minute discussion on my work that is not even halfway finished. The two main inquisitors were a biochemist and a musician. Surprisingly, the biochemist was not the staunch denier, and the musician was not the open conversationalist. The musician was firmly attached to time and did not take kindly to my dissolution of it- completely disregarded the contemporary. For him time was simple. I envied the confidence, I told him that I was unsure of everything. The biochemist compared his own experience of lab work, his attempts to replicate data, the process of taking the average of results- then still only being able to talk in probabilities to my attitude of uncertainty. Took kindly to my suggestion that facts are simply the best answers for things that we have discovered so far. They conversed among themselves as I watched- about different instants, about quarks and quanta, about perception and how memory can skew it. “What do you have to say?” They asked me, I blinked. I said I want to facilitate a shift in perception, the musician asked me what I wanted that to be, I told him that I only have the questions. I saw his opinion of my intelligence lower, he said he doesn’t understand what I am trying to do. I told him he doesn’t have to. The biochemist’s eyes were full of curiosity, I told him that I only have the questions. I didn’t ask them any but they didn’t seem to mind. 

38. The only way to live a second life is to forget you are living it. Be someone else, forget who you were, forget who you are, forget where you are. “Don’t trouble,” J said- “to head anywhere but the sky.” 

40. When you get tired of pretending what do you do? I’m still figuring things out, I just get so tired I can’t close my eyes. So I get the body checked and checked and checked. Again, again, again. 

42. There is an absence in Bhuddist philosophy that is compensated by the interconnectedness of things. I am unsure what it means to be empty and disconnected. Everything that I am was ice cream baller scooped out, rinsed and stitched back together. Perhaps you could put in a good word for me with the trees and the river and the council houses. 

44. I’m starting to lose the thread. I started writing about second lives because I wanted to parse out my thoughts, detail the differences, find others. Are there others? My thoughts are more spun than ever. 

46. In your second life, pain is not a reason to stay in bed. You must deal with the screaming and smile politely at strangers and friends. Sit in lectures and on the train. Take the drugs and pray they help. When someone asks if you are okay, you must say yes. You could say no, but you will never be okay again- you know that. You know that. There is nothing they can do. 

47. My new liver is my companion, it’s working smoothly this time around and sometimes I wonder what it used to be, where it used to go… 

49. I grew up in church. My dyslexic mother taught herself to read using the bible- “you are the apple of my eye” God told her in Zechariah 2:8 and she felt whole. Sunday school taught me I was a sinner and that sickness is a sign of a lack of faith. I should have prayed harder, that’s what was wrong. If only, if only, cause God loves you, if you asked- if only you asked. God loves you, he would not want this. God loves you. 

51. L’s scars healed neater than mine, smaller. 

53. I have written a new song. It goes: Quit this great life I’ve been living/Found my way back home/The streets were the same but my sheets had changed/ With tired eyes I looked out the window/ The wind carried a bird with a branch in its beak, higher than you or me will ever be/ I pray for a future that I’ll never see/ Try to believe their lies but they don’t sit as sweet on their tongues/ Like when I was young/ I keep singing the same song/ I keep hearing the same story told wrong/ I was just playing along/ I was just playing along. 

55. An old lady black audacious- she nearly broke the train by sticking her arm through the door. She smells like back home- like the ocean and heat and the corner shop with imported American cereals and maple bacon that the UK never managed to get a hold of. She smells like hairspray and the blackness of the Caribbean. But her voice, her voice is all Hackney London through and through. She is familiar and she makes my heart hurt. I can’t help but want to smell that smell forever. I stop my music to listen to her- drink in the salt she adds to the air. But I’m getting off at the next stop and we are strangers after all – we’ll never meet again. We’ve never even met. I’ve caught a glancing blow of a wave that broke off from the same dying star. 

57. I bought a book called Self Portraits, it is translated auto-fiction by Osamu Dazai. I don’t like the way he writes women but I like the way he writes. It always feels like a betrayal, reading the great works of great men and liking them.

59. Hey M, when the pressure of 2019 and work and essays were pressing on me like atlas- you knelt by me and shared the load. Keeping our 40 year old roommate up with our singing in revenge for her Trump support lectures, Beyonce she-devil consipracies and impromptu bible sermons. Roasting marshmallows on a Tuesday night in the shared kitchen over a gas fire- passing the days laughing harder than I ever would again. Crouching in the rain like they do in Seoul but outside our dingy high rise in Deptford while you smoke your troubles into my lungs. With you I learn how to be playful and laugh when I find things funny. With me you cry at movies and learn not to hold yourself so tightly. Our windows face another tower block and stay shadowed from dawn to dusk but with you, I didn’t care if I ever saw the sun again. 

61. Hey M, I write it here and not to you. I’m proud that you managed to stand up to your father and tell him to sit down at your sister’s wedding. That you got that tattoo you wanted, that strip of Monet’s sunrise. That you are applying for a masters, that you learned French in three months for the application because in Korea, Japanese doesn’t count as knowing a third language. That they are impressed you studied abroad in English. That you have found someone you want to rest your soul in for life. If you ever need rest- the shape of it is already outlined in mine. That you are hench like you wanted. That your life is easy and good. That your biggest worries are when your Oppa is going to get home so you can climb into bed holding each other. That your biggest anxiety is waiting for the acceptance letter that is sure to come. This sounds bitter, it is not. I wish our memories weren’t tangled up in hardship. It is clear now, as you live your sparkling life- that I was the source of grief. In losing you I have lost I. In losing me, you have found peace. 

63. L tested positive for bowel cancer and we are going through the scans, checks, tests and waiting. I am waiting on my own surgery, there is something else they have to cut out. This time however, it will not be replaced. 

65. I am going to escape to Japan again soon and don’t plan to take the morphine, it is a forbidden substance and I don’t want to deal with the paperwork. My brother asks if I can survive without it, I tell him yes with a confidence I don’t have. Until then I keep writing and think of how sweet it will be to suffer with the Tama river rushing by. 

67. When I was dying quicker than I am now, it was the things that I didn’t do that I regretted. Not the things I did. I didn’t do much and so had alot of regret. Now the second time around, I found it was not a lack of opportunity or braveness that made me boring- it was simply who I am. There are things I cannot do now. And things I can but don’t want to. I have no great stories except the one and the way my mother tells it- it seems like she was the star of the show. 

69. I wish I could tell you that I am living well this time around. I wish I was doing this to give hope but instead I am asking. There must be someone living well. Are you living well?