The Man Who Isn’t There Any More

Mirko Božić
6 min readFeb 6, 2024
Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash

How well do we know people we pass by every day? I’ve been passing by one for many years and never asked myself until I saw an obituary on the door of the bar a local recluse was running. In fact, it had been a bar in the past, but now it had turned into his home. Passing by the windows on my way home at night, you could see the flickering of light inside.

If you listened closely, you could hear sounds, probably from a TV. The shop window was covered with paper from the inside to prevent peeping toms from intruding. It’s a prewar joint that survived the whole mayhem unharmed. What’s more, I’m certain it would survive a nuclear Holocaust as well. For whatever reason, it seems like there’s a secret force protecting it from harm. Unfortunately, it couldn’t protect the occupant from dying.

“They found him the other day” I was told by the waiter from a bar next door. A heart attack. He’d drop by to buy something on a regular basis at the nearby shop until he didn’t shop up one day. And the next one, and then the one after that too. In the end, one of them went over there to check on him and well, there he was. Dead as a doornail.

What made all of this so incomprehensible was that he wasn’t exactly a lone ranger: he had a wife and children, a whole group of people listed on the obituary. Where were they? I couldn’t understand. What could possibly happen to lead to an end like this? Am I sorry I never introduced myself? No. You can’t keep up with everyone. There’s a beggar nearby I regularly talk to but that’s it. If you spread your emotional attention span too wide, it’s bound to get too thin.

In Agatha Christie’s novel “After the Funeral”, the killer benefitted from the fact no one had seen the victim for 20 years so they could hardly see the woman who attended a family funeral wasn’t actually her at all. The same might be true here: the first time I focused on his face was when I saw the photo on his obituary and couldn’t remember how accurate it is. Though it certainly was, you don’t put something heavily layered with disfiguring filters on a something like that. Still, I’d rather have my face put on a mugshot than an obituary. You can stay out of trouble and avoid the former, but nobody escapes the latter. There’s something equally frustrating and calming in it. The final equilibrium. Because once you die, you’re dead.

Photo by Veit Hammer on Unsplash

I regard the past as a large lake covered with floating lotuses and each represents a person that’s out of focus at the moment, existing somewhere in the background of my social media and daily contacts. Sometimes, they rise again and return into my life unexpectedly, reminding me of why we met in the first place. Once again you feel glad you see them.

Maybe it was just the right time, and it often truly is. When it happens, you feel startled and glad that while they’re not in focus, they’re by no means off your radar. That’s why it’s important to nurture relationships of various sorts and acknowledge those around you because you never know if someone you’re hardly noticing would turn into a close friend in the future. That’s more or less exactly what happened to me in several cases and it changed my life.

It’s primarily because everyone who enters into your daily life on any level changes it, even for a single moment. Everything has a purpose notwithstanding the intention. There must be others that I’ll likely only remember when I see them on an obituary, which happened to a man that was sitting on a sidewalk a long time ago with scales and a donation box.

Each time there was someone who’d drop in a tip when they stop to check if they lost any of that holiday gain only to get disappointed with the number they see. In a certain way, you might say there were three entities there: the two people and the third, invisible one hidden in the scales, a mirror image of the customer. Do we own our mirror image? We don’t because we’re not really hiding from reflections, apart from the intellectual kind.

This is an image of deteriorating beauty, a sand castle in a monsoon. I can’t even remember the name and we’re all about names: they give us identity for we can only fathom things we’re able to grasp and if you can’t name it, you can’t grasp it either. Who knows what’s going to happen to that joint, I haven’t seen anyone going in our out ever since he died. It wouldn’t be a surprise if it justs stays the way it is, sitting there like an empty shoe box. Shrodinger’s cat isn’t hiding inside, it wasn’t even there to begin with. Yet I hope its fortune might change one day and the door opens again, a second chance. If this were a ghost story, he’d be silently hovering inside, waiting to jump out to greet the full moon when no one’s out there watching.

Photo by Artem Gavrysh on Unsplash

Today might also be the day when you’ll see someone for the last time so try to make sure to acknowledge their presence if it’s anyone you see more than once in a week. It could be your neighbour, an acquaintance, or your partner. Of course, you can’t predict it, unless you hired a hitman who’s waiting to plant a bullet in their head as soon as you leave. That would make you a bad person and no one wants to be friends with someone like that. Because to be friends with good people you need trust, and for the others, you’ll rather need an alibi. Actually, you might already be acquainted with the latter without even knowing it, so better watch out.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, which is why I make a point of telling those I care for how I feel about them. Who you hang out with says more about who you are than the things you do. We gravitate towards those sharing our own kind of weird. It’s like a sign language. Those who need to understand it always do and that’s as comforting as a cup of cocoa.

The same goes for those you can’t handle: don’t let them be a full stop on your exclamation point. Did anyone tell this man on time he’s loved? It didn’t look like that. But our eyes are fools even when they shouldn’t be. I can’t be too sentimental about someone I wasn’t very close to. That would demand more than I’m able to give. Alan Kurdi is an exception. It’s an unfair comparison though you could argue this sad place was his own Bodrum.

Today I passed by his place again: on the terrace is a group of dead flowerpots. But in the last one, there’s a twig of green leaves still clinging on to life and waiting for the saving grace of spring to wake it up to bloom again. A counter-strike to the decay of time. I’ll bring a bottle of water and take care of it. It’s the least I can do.

Originally, the pots were full of lush white, pink and purple flowers above the plastic chairs and table, ocassionally occupied by guests, too few and far between to be regulars. They’re lost but all is not lost. In the dark, there’s just silence inside. Whatever whisked him away, it must have been a gentle hand. Finally he’s returning home. It’s just skin and bones. On the other hand, our memories are much harder to dispatch. That single, precious drop in the drought.

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Mirko Božić
Mirko Božić

Written by Mirko Božić

Author, critic and founder of the Poligon Literary Festival. If you enjoy my work support it through Buy Me A Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mirkobozic1

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