honeycomb

by Nevin Haque

I turn the key, and the lock jams.

I wrestle with it for a moment, before I am able to let myself in.

The girl who has taken my old room has also taken over our kitchen.

Plates smeared with leftover curry rest in our sink. The smell of cardamom wafts through the air, and I look towards the stove. A pot of bubbling cha is just about to pour over. I twist the dial to low, and a second skin forms over the caramel colored liquid.

I knock, before I let myself into my old roommate’s room.

The queen sized mattress overwhelms the small, university residential room. The radiator by the window sizzles as I place my bag on her Tiffany blue chair. The nightside lamp is on, switch warm with heat, plugged into the extension cord outlets that I warned her not to use.

She is curled into a ball on the mattress, clutching sheets to her chest.

I lay next to her, on the nokshi katha my mother gifted her.

The strings have begun to unravel at the edges. Strands of yellow and blue thread stick to her sweater. I pick them off gently, and flick it away towards the side. I pull the sheet away from her fingers, and place them over where she is unknowingly exposed. I look at her arms. At her tracks.

I wonder if she is dreaming.

“I’m home,” I whisper.

She stirs.

Yawning, she extends a pack of Parliaments to me.

I point to her bangs, wayward and bleached stiff, and she pushes them over her forehead.

“How are you, lovie?”

The skin of her lips begin to split the longer she holds the smile. She twists a loose curl of my hair between her fingers and says, “it’s gotten quite long. Looks good on you.” She grabs a mini-container of Vaseline from under her pillow, and smears the petroleum jelly over her lips.

I watch her, remembering.

She used to pass her straightener through her hair obsessively. “Should I go lighter?” was a question she always asked, holding up contrasting chunks of brown and blonde. She loved Jean Paul Gaultier and Dior. She wore cone bra tops and heart shaped sunglasses to class. When we first met, her Diptyque scents were off-limits, unless there was a possibility I would be having sex that day. After I left Him, she rubbed the Fleur de Paeu hand cream on my wrists, spritzed the perfume behind my ears and under my top. She used Tretnoin to make her skin look younger, firmer, smoother, and could not understand why I refused to use the topical ointment. I showed her Tiktok videos of women peeling skin from their cheeks, and she waved this off, saying, “the shedding is happening because they don’t moisturize or use sunscreen!” and she threw a bottle of La Roche-Posay at me. She dabbed Mac pressed powder under my eyes, said, “I’m going to make you look so pretty for him!” She used French texturizing spray to add volume to my hair, teased and pulled it into a Bardot-esque updo for every party we went to. She cradled my face in her palms, trying to see if every piece of hair was in the right place, if my bangs fell over my face symmetrically.

“You are already beautiful,” she said, “just adding a little something something. Let me know if he notices."

He called me beautiful, every time.

“I’m thinking about body makeup,” she says.

“I hear Dermacol is a really good brand,” I reply.

“How’s school?”

“Same old,” I lie.

“I’m working on a poem, you know. I’m getting ready, for when I come back.”

“Can I read?”

“Obviously.”

I read through the couplets, fingers hovering above carefully placed emdashes, and white spaces. She follows my fingers as the lines swell, curve, tense, and fragment.

“As writers, is it always fucked up to commodify our trauma?” she asks.

“Doesn’t the world owe us something?” I ask, “look at how cruel it’s been to us."

Shake Shack orders when I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything.

“Do you want cheese fries? Or are you still punishing yourself for leaving Him?” I nodded. She had asked, “does it feel good?” I shook my head. I didn’t have to hide from her. She taught me to speak with clarity. Tact constricted us. We worked around our neuroses. I never entered her room without slippers, because whenever I did, she wiped my socks with Lysol. She knew I hated when water fell from our bathroom sink onto the floor, and she made sure every surface was dry before I entered.

She spoke into silences when others dared not to speak. She let people bum her cigarettes, though she knew they were just using her. She let her friends crash on our couch, no questions asked. She talked to homeless people on the street. Our classmates hated when she offered notes that was more high literature, and they hated the obscure book recommendations they were never smart enough to read. They made sure she wasn’t in any of the bathroom stalls, before saying things like, “she’s fucking crazy." They were unkind but she still greeted them with a smile, even after I told her.

She cried, and the sun lost its light. She said, “I want to be freely passionate. This fucking brain,” she says, smacking her head with her right hand, still holding a zippo lighter between her fingers. “I want to make sense to people and myself. Can’t I just have ADHD?”

“Do you have a plan?”

“I’m lessening the dosage, everyday,” she says.

It isn’t true, because she changes the subject.

“I visited your ex-husband to talk about my debilitating drug problems, and all he wanted to do was talk about you.”

“I’m sorry. I thought he would know how to help you.”

“I mean, read the room, silly boy! I’m dying here!”

A beat.

Quietly, “Are you really?”

She hits my shoulder playfully, and I catch her hand. I turn over her arm, and she jerks away. With her other hand, she places her glass ashtray between us. Points at my right hand. I have been planning her funeral in my head for so long the cigarette has reached my fingertips.

“Do you think I’m disgusting?” she asks, after another silence.

“No. I think you are sick. I want you to get better.”

“I’m going to!”

“I would feel more assured if there was a definitive plan…”

“I have to pee,” she says, suddenly, running out.

And I start crying.

She returns, hovering at the doorway, with french pressed coffee for us both.

“Lovie, I’m really not dying,” she says, sitting face to face with me, holding me like she used to. I look into her eyes, trying ignore the red around the edges. I glance at the insides of her elbows, different lines and splotches of brown, purple, and green. Tree branches with no flowers or leaves.

“I can find my veins so much better than a nurse ever could.”

I hate that I laugh.

“That’s not funny.”

“I know, lovie. I am sorry. But you have to believe me.”

“I do believe you…”

“Because I would never lie to you. You know this, right? Have I, in the two years we’ve known each other, lied to you?”

I shake my head.

“I want to get better. I do, I promise.”

“Okay,” I sniffle, “because I can’t lose him—and you, at once.”

She wraps her arms around me, rubbing my back.

“You won’t leave me, right?” she asks.

“I won’t leave.”

“You’re still an answer to a prayer I’ve never made,” she says.

Our Christmas GoPuff delivery, a couple of months ago.

Toilet paper. Glazed donuts that froze over. Strawberries for me, Nutella for her.

Honeycomb ice cream from Van Leeuwen.

“This is far too sweet,” I said, after a spoonful.

She dug the same spoon into an older container of Nutella.

“No such thing as too sweet.”

I stuck my tongue out in disgust, and she turned on her HomePod. Bass guitar thrummed against our walls. I grabbed her hands, spinning her around, scream singing—and don’t go there, because you’ll never return/I know you think of me when you think of her/but then it don’t make sense when you’re trying hard/to do the right thing but without recompense—

Now I watch, as the thing dissolves from a solid to a liquid. I knot one of her Dior scarves in my hands, and undo them, over and over. The orange flame turns blue under the spoon and the stopper of the syringe moves slowly.

I look away right before the needle re-pierces her skin.

Photo of Nevin Nahar

BIO: Nevin Nahar Haque is a Muslim, Bangladeshi-American storyteller from in Queens, New York. Her writing explores the intersections between generational trauma, grief, and love. She is an MFA candidate at Columbia University School of the Arts, working on her first novel. Her writing has been published in Rat's Ass Review, and is forthcoming in places she cannot yet name...but she posts on her Substack weekly: Nevin's Rambles. You can also find her on Instagram, @nebbani, and her wedding content creation account @nevinspov.