Nightmare recall is hopefully the last stage of my grieving. I think I need to process this last bit of journey through writing. I miss writing and I am realizing that when they died, parts of myself died with them. Or maybe they just went into hibernation. Well, some trees fall to make space for others to grow.
How do we deal with grieving? I can only speak for myself. In the past year, I’ve had three deaths happen in my intimate proximity, some closer than others. One has become a part of me and it really hurt when it was removed – it was then that I first heard about takotsubo cardiomyopathy. That was the second death. The first death was just a passing cloud, it was like I saw someone’s soul for a few moments and then it just popped off, it evaporated. A mirage, if it wouldn’t have been for the debris that his death left behind – the grieving family, the confused friends, the regret and self-blame, the attempts to turn back time, to do things differently. It was one of those accidents that was actually a suicide, though we don’t call it that. One of those accidents that we were expecting to happen, from someone who was falling deeper and deeper into madness. And the third death? The third death also happened. That is too close to home to mention. It’s too shameful. It’s all too shameful.
Nightmare #2
I wish I had written a book while I was alive. My life story. I shared it with the digital universe, through vanishing Telegram messages and hysterical voicemails. It was like writing it in the sand, on a beach. It has washed off by now, although my voice is still here, immortalized in some vague, mumbling monologues. I was mentally disturbed, it’s not my fault I was talking like that, don’t judge me. I hate judgement. You don’t know how you would’ve reacted if you were in my situation. It’s been 9 months since I’ve been gone. Like a gestation. Do you know what is happening now in occupied Chechnya? If you’re interested, search for some cheerful propaganda, from Chechnya with Love kinda stuff, and you’d think it’s all cherry trees in bloom and mountain lakes unfreezing. The biggest mosque in Eurasia. It’s all been reconstructed, it’s back to normal, Russian magical infrastructure. But actually, three days ago, a 16 year old boy attacked two Russian policemen and managed to mortally wound one of them before he was killed. And a blessing it was that he was killed, a gift from Allah. If he had been kept alive, it wouldn’t be his corpse that’s being humiliated and degraded, it would’ve been his little living body. Have you seen the tortured, smashed-in faces of the alleged Azerbaijanis who were accused of the ‘terrorist attacks’ that happened in Moscow, in March 2024? It wasn’t them, I can tell you that. From here, from beyond the grave, we have a clearer viewpoint, a sharper perspective. They were just the unhappy scapegoats, I’m sure even you figured that one out. But let’s get back to our most recent martyr – Eskerhan Khumashev was his name. The next day after his naive one-adolescent-revolution, silence in the kingdom, and the day after that the corpse of the young boy was paraded around Grozny. In the morning, locals were gathered from their homes, schools and factories and herded to see the desecration, primary school kids were taken out of school to watch the procession. The body was dragged on the streets and kept outside mosques, city halls and malls, surrounded by women and men who wanted to cry but who, instead, spat on it. If you don’t believe me, look it up. There are grotesques videos of it on guerilla forums. The family of the kid was arrested and is now held in some undisclosed place, probably never to be seen again. Elders, adults, kids, the youngest a mere 15 years old. It is the Russian tradition in occupied Chechnya to humiliate the victims and their families, to make an example of them – this is what happens if you raise your voice, if you ‘protest’. There is no space for insurgence, here. We are the terrorist state, we are the Russian Empire. Ah, how I love the Noxchi spirit, the Vaynakhs, our people…
But you don’t see this, you don’t care, those who call yourselves European liberals, the washed-out ‘hippies’. You think whatever the carefully curated social media posts want you to think. You think suveranism is a type of music, like psy trance. You think extremism is all facial tattoos and studded boots. You think socialism and communism are free-range, no artificial EMFs community festivals. You are the banality of evil. All of you, the nostalgic, you think a cheap apartment in an asbestos building is worth your freedom and dignity, because you have none of that, anyway. How I used to despise gormless Europeans, when I was alive… Despise and envy them. We would have appreciated your freedom, we, who have been stripped of all choice and all humanity for decades, centuries. Whole generations turned into cannon fodder and factory meat. Such a sad life I had. And yet, I wouldn’t change any of it for your plastic understanding. I was real, I was in the middle of things, I was chosen by the Goddess of Creation to see Her most gruesome face, and love Her anyway.
It must be obvious by now that it is this kind of vitriolic (self-)hate that has killed us all. All three of us, we imploded with misguided understanding. I read once, on one of the ridiculous AI Instagram accounts I used to follow obsessively, hoping they would help me escape my sick reality, that there’s a difference between a light worker and a light slave. It’s like the difference between entrepreneurship and a corporate job. A light worker is one who sees through the bullshit and manages to make manure out of it – they have the serenity to accept what they cannot change, the courage to change what they can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And the light slave? He sees through the bullshit, sees it for what it is and the realization crushes him, suffocates him, drowns him, eats him alive. Kills him.
When I died, I was found days after, lying on my stomach in the hallway. I was blue and I was clutching my goddamn phone, my last and most loyal friend. I could feel Death coming to me for months and the few hours before it actually arrived, I could feel the draft. My throat was throbbing and the pain in my head was breathtaking. The veins in my brain literally burst under the pressure. And do you know what they say about Yama, the Lord of Death? He always comes from behind and he is more than Darkness, he is Void. He sucks you in and you try to cling to your senses, your memory, you identity, but they all slip through like they were made of gas. You hear Lord Yama’s buffaloes crushing your mind, your being, and you feel the noose pulling you into the void, and the mace cutting off your senses and the ground beneath your feet…
I was born in a small village in North Caucasus and I remember my early years as being terribly happy. I don’t know exactly what I remember, because I can barely remember the years before my death, let alone the early 90s. I think they were mostly implanted memories, stories I told myself based on images I had gathered from old photographs. I was trying to make some sense of the chaos that was happening around me. Now, with the hindsight of death, I think my family was poor and fighting a lot, I think my brothers were abusive, I think my sister was a mindless pawn (aren’t all women?), I think my father was too ‘loving’, I think my mother was cruel… I think the grandparents hated and resented the younger generation who, naturally, hated and resented us. But we didn’t use to call it hate, back then, we were calling it love. This was before the ‘woke’ culture, we were simple and archetypal. We were a tribe. An unwilling tribe. Or at least, I was unwilling. I never wanted to be part of these people, of any people. I was independent and that was probably where all the suffering began.
‘On April 9, a rally was held in Achkhoy-Martan, to which public sector employees, students and schoolchildren were required to attend – the body of the man (boy) who had attacked the traffic police post the day before was placed in front of those gathered on the square near the district administration.’
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