Grief Seed

BlizzardeyeWonder · #1

[Meena Lalita Kumar continued from We Will Find You - Acting on your best behavior, turn your back on Mother Nature]

Meena Lalita Kumar died at the age of 9. That stupid, spacey kid wasn’t looking where she was going, and got hit by a car.

She was under consideration for the gifted program, you know? Apparently she took a test and her IQ was 120 or something weird like that. There was one question she got really, really hung up on, but she’d never live to hear her fellow gifted classmates talk about how embarrassingly easy that question was. She’d never learn to find out her IQ was, or that it was kind of bullshit as a method of measuring intelligence.

The adults wouldn’t remember how she was kind of a brat, kind of a crybaby, who routinely got out of trouble with tears (genuine tears, but that was still unforgivable). Actually, come to think about it, they wouldn’t talk about her, really. They would, but everything they said would be poisoned by what could have been, which is what they were really talking about. She was such a bright kid, she could have won a Nobel prize one day. We came all the way to the west because we knew the Bangladeshi education system wouldn’t be right for her (this, Meena knew, was a lie - she wasn’t allowed to talk about the actual reasons, though). Dead kids were great fuel for the imaginations of their parents. You could project any desire you wanted onto them, and the kid couldn’t complain or disappoint you.

Meena’s parents wanted money, status, and grandkids. They wouldn’t get that, unless they were willing to push two-year-old Arjun when he got older. Maybe they would, in this reality. Maybe they’d just coddle him even more with Meena out of the way.

In a way, this was a happy ending for someone.

---

Meena Lalita Kumar died at the age of 12. Nobody’s sure how she did it, but she drowned herself in her middle school’s pool.

In the locker room, she left a note addressed to every one of her classmates in the gifted program. Everyone got a scathing entry, calling out every little thing they did that Meena noticed and hated, every nasty thing they said behind someone else’s back that she heard. In life, Meena probably said some vapid, nice things about maybe one or two people in that class. If those people believed that made them Meena’s friends, they were sorely mistaken, as they’d discover in that note.

A twelve-year-old Meena was an entirely different beast from the nine-year-old version. She was moody and unfriendly to her parents and brother, spent all her time on the computer, and - most critically - she wasn’t the brightest little star in the class anymore. Not when she was surrounded by bigger, brighter geniuses. Talented people, who could sing and dance and do math and build robots at state-levels competitively. Terrible people, yes, but at least they had the decency to be useful and impressive.

Her parents were probably quietly glad she was gone before she could go any further down.

---

Meena Lalita Kumar died at the age of 16. She hanged herself in her room, near her computer, open to some direct messages on Discord.

It was December 23rd, which would have been her first anniversary of getting together with an online friend. Actually, it might actually be the anniversary? Esper wasn’t clear on whether they were still together or not. He used words and phrases like “taking a break” and “a little spark was still left that would become a roaring fire again, someday”.

She left a link to her last note in her usual hangout, with her writer… peers. She’d done that sort of thing before, but she deleted it after half an hour or so, usually after failing to summon up the courage to actually use the knives in the kitchen, or the bleach. Nobody ever noticed, or if they did, they didn’t react. This time would probably be different, because Meena wouldn’t be around to delete it. Meena wouldn’t be around to answer messages, if any came asking for her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they still wouldn’t care very much.

Oh great, the most spoiled, well-off kid in the chat killed themselves because of some boy we tried to warn her we didn’t like. We're all struggling so much more, with more abusive parents and more physical and emotional pain and more stress about finances. What was one measly suicide among all our personal troubles? She never talked to us all that much anyway and her writing was honestly not like, world-changing or anything. She wrote yandere schlock on Tumblr for god’s sake. Why do you expect us hurt people to care? We don’t have the energy or undamaged parts for it.

Sometimes she fantasized about how she would be eulogized, because it was much harder to think I’m a good writer than it was to think about someone saying She was a good writer. In the back of her mind, she figured it would be nothing more than that - a fantasy. How things generally went was that the more Meena wanted something, the less likely she was to get it.

---

Meena didn’t die at the age of 18, but he did emerge from a chrysalis.

[Akshya Lalita Kumar - START]

Akshya was the short form of a much longer Sanskrit name. He found it in a kid’s summary of the Ramayana, that his mom put on the shelf a long time ago, tucked between the Warrior Cats books. It belonged to one of Ravana’s sons, and it was derived from the Sanskrit word for “sky”. It was nice to be named after something so boundless and beautiful - sunrises and sunsets and all the colours of the clouds were the few things in the world that made Akshya feel uncomplicatedly warm inside, even when it was raining or snowing.

What Akshya did depended on a dreamer’s whim. Maybe he starts a band, or writes a series of novels, or makes a video game. He would be an artist, and a beloved, widely-discussed one at that. His work, of course, would still be dark and melancholic, a little bit surreal. In that one way, Meena didn’t really want to change, even if it strained the bounds of this fantasy’s credibility.

But none of this could last, obviously. Success was fleeting, and deceptive if you were anything like Akshya. Maybe he says the wrong thing in the wrong place, or just runs out of that spark that lets him make things. His audience was full of hurt people, even if they were only hurt in the passive way that results from existing in a society that hates queer people. They’d blow up at any sign of betrayal, real or perceived. After all, he is a gender traitor, probably racefaking, whatever they decided would be the worst thing to call him.

When this inevitability comes to pass, this dream would end.

[Akshya Lalita Kumar could have never existed for long. Meena remains.]

---

Meena Lalita Kumar died at the age of 21. She kept failing first year university courses, and someone - either her or her parents - couldn’t take the shame.

---

Meena Lalita Kumar died at the age of 40. She graduated university and got a normal office job. Her hours got upped and she no longer had the time to write, and when she did, she usually ended up scrapping it anyway. One day she took a baseball bat to her hard drive and threw herself in the rapids of a nearby river.

---

Meena Lalita Kumar died some time in her 70s, as tradition demanded. Liver failure, cancer, pneumonia… some old person disease that usually kills people a decade or two her senior.

---

Meena Lalita Kumar would die at the age of 17. It hadn’t happened yet, but it would.

Millie’s death must have happened after some cutoff, because it wasn’t on the announcements, but Meena doubted they’d ignore it entirely. He was getting antsy, impatient to hear those damning words echo over the island. It didn’t seem awfully likely that anyone in their class would go out to avenge Millie specifically, no, but there would definitely be people targeting killers in general.

Ever since her middle school years, Meena was hyper-aware of his own death. She saw it in her rear-view mirror, and knew (more than most, he suspected) that it was always closer than it appeared. She never did expect to live past the age of 20, and now he knew it for certain.

Killing Millie in the way she had should have accomplished the one thing he wanted - to go out showing the world exactly who she was on the inside. A nasty, hateful, dangerously sensitive, hurt person. He never did claim to be any better than the people she wrote horrible call-outs for in his drafted suicide notes.

Maybe she wasn’t satisfied because he hadn’t yet reaped what she’d sown. The emptiness was the same hollow feeling that anyone would get from having to wait.

The shotgun lay across his stomach as she lay on the ground. He stared up into the black eye of a camera in the corner, as she chewed on a protein bar. He was never a particularly patient person, after all.

[Meena Lalita Kumar continued in Witch Barrier]