MOURN ME. for @kasimirfrei & @ofrooks // freedom comes at a cost, you know this. why do you keep paying the prize when it might not be worth it? // trigger warning for grief, mentions of death.
They don’t have graves. Maybe it has something to do with the way the Sectatores view death or maybe it’s just what the survivors deserve. No place to return to, when they want to give shape to their grief. No physical reminder of what you’ve lost. Of what they made themselves lose. No ash, no dust, no bones — nothing but the gaping hole in a chest, organ removed, frostbite.
This is how it was always destined to be. Fate demanded that there could be one survivor, one free corvid and in this version of the story, the chosen one is Mateo — but is this freedom? Why does that concept – which really is just that: a concept, a vague idea, a promise that is never kept – always come at the steep prize of other people’s lives? Besides, isn’t it in death that one reaches complete freedom? Untethered, let loose, no longer tied down by earthly things like gravity and responsibility.
It has been three years since they got the Tear. Three years since the pay-out, which really just meant that the others had to pay up. Three years of no Blue Jay, no Caedes Corvi, no birds flocking at windows except for a curious pigeon that’s just a pigeon. Three years of trying to live with the guilt that sleeps in his bed, sits on his couch, takes a beer from his fridge and picks at his dinner. Three years of both their voices in his head, a chorus of condemnation. It should have been you, not us. I would have found a way through. I would have been the right victor.
Grief demands rituals. Mateo tends to return to the coast, because that’s where his grief has always felt best. For the others he lost, he has made other rituals: strumming guitars for Pasi and the recording of one of Isa’s performances playing quietly every now and then, Anezka’s books sitting on a shelf and the lighter Fei once stole off only used to light candles. He’s not sure how to mourn Lawrence or most of the others, but he tries.
But for them, he drives to the coast.
He’s always mourned family there, a childlike belief that his mother lives within the waves having stuck to him. If there’s no ashes, no bones, no bodily remains: then there is this. From all the metaphors about grief, he’s always liked the one about the sea most. That it ebbs and flows, takes and gives, reaches and subtracts. That no matter how calm the ocean might be one moment, it will always be ruthless the next. Grief, endless and cyclical, repetitive and systemic.
He parks his car and sits in it until the song finishes. It’s another little ritual: these mix tapes he’s made, continues to make. Music released into the world in the years they no longer breathe, reminding him of them — as if that, too, is just proof that there really is no free will. That things are created to remind him of his suffering and that he’s not alone in that. This is not a comforting thought. It never has been.
Eyes closed, hands on steering wheel. He’s loitering. Delilah would berate him for it, Kasimir would sit with him in it. If he wasn’t here, neither of them would sit here, accepting his grief and building rituals around it — Kasimir would undo the structures that had made this so. Delilah would look away from it and hold her head high. Mateo lets himself be swallowed. Wades into the salty waters of loss and considers floating away on it. Carried to whatever is behind the horizon.
Sometimes, he tries to do what they might have done. Rage pushes him to investigate the Faceless, to hunt this thing that cannot be hunted, to think of vengeance as a higher cause followed in their name. Other days, he tries to move as if grief hasn’t created a hole in his being and it really is easier to breathe that way, ignoring emotions. Until his lungs constrict, that is.
The song ends. He unbuckles his seatbelt, opens the door, is greeted by the air of salty sand and smiles faintly.
Two years ago, he was sitting by himself at a bar, nursing a drink and considering future paths and divergences. A conversation was struck, with a stranger — the type that can only live in the liminal space of a bar fifteen minutes before closing, continued once it does while walking cobbled roads and chain-smoking cheap cigarettes. She spoke of her brother, the freshly turned earth of his grave, the fucking headache that finding a headstone was in this economy, how ugly most of them are, how every day since the funeral had felt heavier than the one before somehow, when grief is supposed to become lighter.
Mateo listened, as he always does, and speaks then: “I had a brother and sister. I lost them, too.” Cigarette raised to lips, embers glowing. He’d switched to Kas’ favoured brand of smokes by then. “Never had a funeral. No grave.”
“Cremated?”
“No. It’s a long story, but nothing.”
She’s quiet.
“I wish there was a grave. Even if it was with an ugly headstone. Or a place, where we scattered ashes. You know, anything.”
A snort. “Yeah. I get that.” She lights up another cigarette, sways lightly. “Make your own place, then. It’s not the body you mourn, right? Not the dead one, I mean. So it could be anywhere. A grave, or a place.”
He’s taken off his shoes by now, socks balled up in his sneakers. Sand between his toes. Mateo feels weighed down by the weight of his body moving through the sand, but soon enough he’s standing with his feet in water.
This is their place, this small strip of beach. An hour long walk from the parking lot, often abandoned. Sometimes he spots a seal. Most of the times, it’s just the seagulls wondering if he’s brought a snack he can share. There’s people that walk past, but not many that put down their towel. It’s — quiet, yet loud. It’s infinite.
Sometimes, it feels forced to come here. He’s stopped planning it, though: has started giving into the unpredictable beats of grief. Gets in his car and drives. Every time he gets here, where the dunes are a familiar shape and the water finally reaches his toes, he considers himself and his right to grieve them. Considers the shape of his grief. The kitchen knives that remind him of Kas, the whistling kettle that reminds him of Lila. The cruelty that got him here — his own, as well as that of the Faceless.
What makes a sibling? It takes a pair of people putting more than one child together and undeniably tethering these children together. Red thread, binding organs and minds together. Shared experience, shared weight, shared root, shared rot. It seems dramatic, sometimes, to consider Rook and Magpie his late siblings — but hadn’t it been like that? Put together, sharing burden and stature, ordered in a natural order, tied together with red thread.
He cannot wield a scissor to cut that thread. He couldn’t when they were in the depths of it, hunting after the Tear while hunting after each other and he still cannot now. He feels it, those tethers, pulling at his hands as waves lap at his ankles. They beckon him forward, to a place where they can once again be together. Rope around his heart, constricting. Stuck in his lungs, cramping. Tied around his stomach, removing appetite.
He stands in the sea and he always says the same: “I miss you. And I’m sorry.”
He does not come for forgiveness, because it’s not something the dead can grant you. He comes only to have a place to lay his grief and hope that it’s enough to honour them. The only thing that’s left to do for his fellow corvids is remembrance through ritual. Make a place for them even if they no longer inhabit the world. It is not enough — but it’s all there is.
