Please — consider him as a dream.

In those days, he found beauty in mundanity. He wanted to write about cleaning tea cups. He would sip his tea, and watch digger wasps disappear into the sand. He would rearrange his books, and dust the shelves. He would watch the dust settle in patterns over days, noting down their shapes like constellations. He would enjoy silence for hours amid noise around him at peak.
He was an extension of grief. He held the cups in his shivering hands, the way a fanatic holds a God he doesn’t understand. He was always afraid of grief spilling over, so he cleaned the cups for hours. He always boiled the water before pouring milk into it. He always offered a cup of tea to an invisible person, visible to him. He ground the sugar, and left some of it near the wasp’s home. He didn’t want the children to die, in case the mother forgot her home, so he killed the ants that ate his sugar. He made his place, in little spaces of nature where he wasn’t needed. Grief had a ritual of its own. I think he understood a part of the truth. The violence in his kindness wasn’t lost on him. Maybe, that is why he made it into a ritual, an event rather than an eternity.
He considered books as only occasions of poetry. Poetry, in its continuity was contained in life. In those days, he actually read a lot of Kafka. He read it with a distaste of recognition.
The imagery to his life was supplied by Kafka. A clerk working at a desk was stuck in the most profound confusion of his life. It was all so strange. It was so strange that it seemed inevitable. I think that is what he felt in those days, an inevitable delusion, and he hated Kafka for robbing him of his grief.
He would sit for hours at one place, staring into the lake. In one of his letters, he wrote that if he swam to the bottom of the lake, he would find the moon. In fact, he wrote about all of it. All the thoughts spilling over pages, and for what, even he didn’t know. He just felt that he was documenting truth in fragments. And then, he stopped. One day, in the loneliness of his house, dead with Kafka lying by his side.

He is sitting on a dusty sofa thinking- there is so much mundanity in grief. Who will finish the rituals now?