Nostalgia is not a country on any map, but a territory that blooms in the periphery, a treacherous silt that gathers in the hollows of the night. The past is a gravity that bends the light in the room. Many yawning nights have been spent rummaging in that faint, magnetic field for the phosphorescence of a smile, only to feel the slow, peat-bog burn of a memory or the sudden, clinical gut-punch of a photograph. In one such rectangle of captured light, two of the four people are no longer a phone call away.
Their numbers are still there in the digital ledger, of course, neat and silent as headstones. You can no longer be upset, hold a grudge, or send a meme that would have made them snort-laugh. The digital effigy persists, a stubborn ghost in the machine, and you are caught in the ritual of neither deleting nor dialling, a priest at an altar of a god you know has departed.
I have entombed his last WhatsApp message in a folder called “Locked,” a digital reliquary. Sometimes, when I am scrolling through the archive—a desert of forgotten group chats and expired coupons—if I drag my thumb down with a specific, desperate violence, the locked folder pops into existence, unbidden, a secret door swinging open on a room I keep sealed. The sight of it, that single, silent line of text, is a sudden pressure change. I must kill the app, force-quit it, as if stifling a heartbeat.
I remember how I continuously moaned about him to my sister, a litany of his minor sins that were, I see now, merely the friction of his living presence against mine. The last time we spoke, a lie bloomed on my tongue, a small, white, protective lie I thought was a kindness. Three months later, on a Wednesday of no particular weather, he simply left. A thousand kilometres away, I felt a nullity, a vacuum in the afternoon, a sensation like a single drop of cold water tracing a path down my spine. I chalked it up to him thinking of me—for we did that, our telepathy was a real and unremarked-upon thing, as natural as the migration of birds—and I ignored the hollow ring of the moment. The news came a day later, in the stark geometry of a friend’s message. He died. Just like that.
Do you know the shape of loss? It is not an abstract void. It is the shape of an ignored text message, its words bleached of meaning. It is the specific, crystalline geometry of an inane lie, now turned to stone in your stomach. It is the shape a glass of water makes when it shatters on the kitchen floor, the news of your best friend’s death having travelled up the phone line and down your arm, unstringing the muscles of your hand. Panic, then, gets hold of your throat, a physical vine tightening, and you flip through the digital scrapbook too quickly, a frantic botanist in a hothouse of poisonous flowers, only to be dealt another blow: a saved voicemail where he says “Hey, call me back,” his voice an artefact of a lost world.
Get out of there. You must. Before the air itself, thick with the pollen of what was, makes you suffocate.
My best friend died. It’s been 1124 days. Would the shape of it be more dramatic, more defined, if I carved it in another tongue? Mon meilleur ami est mort. The words feel like cool, smooth stones in my mouth. It is the only fitting irony; he loved to quote Camus, to speak of the benign indifference of the universe.
And now, some mornings, I do not wake with sadness, but with a hunger. It is an all-consuming, physical hunger, a hollow in the marrow. A ravenous need to hear the particular cadence of his voice, to tell him some utterly inane piece of trivia, to hear him ramble on, to pontificate about Kafka or the proper way to brew tea—all the things I once rolled my eyes at, now as precious and vanished as a species of moth we alone knew how to find.