Cover image by Enuku Lipenga on Artstation.
I’m pretty sure it’s talking about a failed marriage, but I find it poetic that the last song Nux ever played on his Spotify was End of a Spark by Tokyo Police Club — because what a spark he was.
I tell everyone who will listen that he would be so happy to see me lose my mind like this over him. I sometimes get the impression he thought I was too impassive when it came to handling him. Which he’d be right about, because I tried to make it so. He’d affected me once and I never wanted to go back there again. Did he sense it back then? How I cried over him a whole day at work to the point my workmates told me to go home. I never told him this story. I don’t regret it because he’d have had that smug expression on his face. Anyone who knew him knows the one I’m talking about. I can hear his voice now, if I’d told him then, “Well, don’t lose your mind over me, Purps. Okay, maybe just a little.”
I thought he was done breaking my heart but here I am, in true Finneas fashion, a whole half a decade later, losing my mind over him again — because through it all he remained my friend. To think we were a hairline away from losing that but somehow we didn’t. We made it work. We spoke at least every other day even if it was briefly. One of us always had something to share – a book, a meme, a lot of music. Despite myself, he made me laugh, whether intentionally or not. Every few business days he’d tell me to stop nudging him on Duolingo because he’d already done his lesson and saved our friend streak.
Now my playlist is riddled with sparks of him and I can’t get through a lesson of Duolingo without crying. I always thought we’d lose that damned streak because of me not the vice versa. He was definitely more consistent with that homicidal owl.
Even as I write this, I can hear his laugh in my brain even now. It’s a little less mocking then it would have been in 2020. He is telling me it’s okay. It’s all alright. It is what it is. He is telling me that he’s sorry for going, but it makes him happy a little that I care this much.
*
Here’s a list of things I’ve done in the time he’s been gone:
- Emailed Duolingo to keep our streak alive ( I doubt they’ll ever answer me).
- Repaired said streak with my hard earned xps though I know he isn’t on the other side.
- Lost the streak todays after.
- Listened to End of Spark. Didn’t care much about it but cried anyway.
- Wondered and hoped I’d sent him the album i,i by Bon Iver though I remember sending him Hey Ma from it. So a comfort there.
- Doubted I’d sent him the song 715 – CRΣΣKS by Bon Iver. Wished I had.
- Regretted the fact that we never made a Spotify blend together despite how much music we sent each other.
- Wondered if anyone would ever call me Purps again. (His best friend probably will one day down the line.)
- Combed through every interaction we ever had.
- Combed through all my favourite memories of us.
- Combed through anything I could find of him on the internet.
- Wondered how time could just continue to pass on.
- Made some dark jokes he’d have appreciated.
- Tried to remember how hugging him felt like. It’s all a blur.
- Got saddened that the passage of time would blur even more memories of him.
- Wished I had taken more pictures of the two of us.
- Searched for playlists and poems about “the dull ache of losing someone.”
- Stared for ages at the gigantic tennis ball he got me when I moved away from Lilongwe.
- Cried a hell lot.
- Watched a few YouTube videos on what grief does to the brain.
- Contemplated reading every single book he’d ever listed on his Goodreads.
- Wondered if this is a bad dream.
- Wondered if an afterlife is real.
- Wondered if it is, and I lived to be fifty, would my soul at fifty be conversing with his soul at twenty-eight if we ever met on the other side.
- Wondered about the mechanics of any sort of afterlife and dreaded it.
- Wondered if I’d have had the same visceral effect on him if I’d died first.
- Wished he could haunt me as an apparition and not just a memory.
In the hauntingly loving memory of Enuku Lipenga: 12 April, 1997 – 2 October, 2025.
