about Kim.

Or it isn’t about him, although influenced by him.

It’s not a Noel Coward play, either.

Kim did die on 15 August, and his death and the hallway confessions I have had with him throughout this blog are the only things that are based on reality. It’s true, I really did love him and he really did die. I wasn’t with him when he died, though – he died in a hospital room in Texas, I found out about it 12 hours later on a sunny afternoon in Stockholm. I am not sure how I would have reacted had I been there – perhaps how I wrote that scene is how I would behave. Come to think of it, it’s exactly as I would behave, so maybe this writing is partly me in some way. I don’t know for sure, but if I know him (and I think I did) then he died on his own, without anyone around. He used to say that when he died – or as he called it, “time for a cool drink of water” – then he would do it alone. If I know him, he did exactly that, checking out while nurses handed over from the night shift to the day shift, while people who loved him were rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, while the sun started to bake the Texas earth.

Then again we never really know anyone.

He inspired the story, which had started off in a very different vein. He inspired it, but it’s not about him. I can remember his face with clarity, but a lot of the habits and ways of being he had have faded in my memory, the conversations and ways we had dissipating. He was childlike. And when I loved him, so was I.

The hallway confessions between us are over. They ended the way they should do. He wouldn’t approve of my life, and although I don’t know where he is, I can bet that wherever he landed I wouldn’t approve of the company he’s keeping. Today I love him in the way that you love the special ones.

My story, my fiction, my whatever it’s going to turn out to be, is writing itself. It pours itself out on the computer when I can (work and family permitting), or it comes in phrases that only I understand in a polka-dotted notebook that I carry around with me. Whole chapters are written on a song that I will have downloaded and play on repeat. When I go back and re-read what I’ve written it sounds like the song that played in my ears and head while it was being written. It’s not all dark, this work, because as everything goes there are ups and downs and windows which need throwing open.

It has a title, which those initials stand for. I’ll keep that to myself for now, but my writing – rather like my blog – chose the name for itself. It popped into my head unexpectedly (and at the most random of times) and it was unequivocal that it had to be called that.

I had one of the shocks of my life – while sitting down and Googling, I decided to plug Kim’s real name into Google with a specific phrase, all in quotes. What popped up immediately was a website whose domain was his name. And the entire entry I was directed on was about – and I am honestly not making this up – death, and how there is life after death. The entry had a religious slant that would not be his style (although I know and have seen myself that some people embrace religion when faced with terminal illness), but it’s the last paragraph that struck me in the chest:

One thing is for certain. We will all die. No one gets out of here alive. As we get older, we realize that life really is short. If, as the evidence supports there is life after death, then we must seek to understand all we can about it, because…eternity is a long, long time.

The sheer and total shock of it is that those words are words that he used, to the letter.

And I read that and wonder if my hallway is going to be haunted again someday.

-S.