A Scavenger

I want to write about dead people. I want to write about the ones that dead people leave behind. I want to write about death. But I cannot. I just cannot. It feels dirty, not death, I, me, I feel dirty. I feel so pathetic when I even think about writing on death. I am so disgusting. I am so pathetic that I want to scavenge dead like black ugly vultures, I fly around.

I fly around the post mortem house, always turn my head towards it. Many times, it is empty unless some policemen are coming out with boxes of evidence or maybe remains? Maybe. I do not know. That department doesn't concern me yet.

I had this big urge to see an autopsy. I still have it, but not as strong as I had a month ago. Every time I went that way, I had this sudden desire to storm through that wooden old door, and look at the body, and see everything, just gather everything inside myself, the odour, the sight, the expression of dead, and the expression of doctors, of the staff, and the expression of mine, just fill that building inside myself, and feel it. I used to think about this gleefully, with a grin, a grin that might resemble that of a pillaging savage. Not anymore, I would like to say but I am not so sure.

Every morning, I go to the library that way. And most of the days I see women, women crying, crying so sad, so sad, so sad, I cannot describe. Every time I hear the wails, I feel a hole, a big blunt hole, in my heart.

I saw a body today, covered fully, in an orangish sheet, kept outside on the campus road. A group of women sat around one end, another group on the other end, I couldn't make out, which one end was the head. One woman was holding a part of the body, most probably the head, and was caressing it, in her hands, it looked loose, decapitated? Accident? I couldn't say. It was all so wrapped in that orange sheet of cotton. And she was crying, not loud, not quite, she was crying, a constant amplitude. Like have you seen ECG machines going "beeeeppppp" when the patient dies, in movies, the beep, that constant, frequency or amplitude or whatever, I don't remember my wave mechanics. But you get it, her crying, so sad, so so so sad. The men were sitting on the pavements, a group here, another group there, like birds on wire, you know, lepidic pattern from pathology? Like that. And women like epithelioid cells around the caseous necrosis, the dead. The men were just sad, heads down, some of them looking at us, going through our day, unconcerned with their misery. A policeman here or there with a sheet of paper. I wonder what they write about in it. I wonder what words they use. What words could they use? What words could I use?

What words could I use to describe? I am a scavenger. A pillaging savage. A looter who hunts dead soldiers from battlefields. I am pathetic. I dare write about the dead.