My phone is running out of battery.

Yeah, Asma. That’s smart. Start off with something mundane and normal and so ridiculously every day, like it’ll divert from the new reality, the new every day. What’s next? Should I click my heels together thrice? I’m barefoot, so there is that.

Considering the crazy amount of its-the-end-of-the-world literature that I’ve consumed, there is nothing that comes into handy. It’s ridiculous of me to expect to learn life lessons or survival hacks from someone else’s gruesome imaginings.

Oh God. What am I doing?

I’m spiralling deeper and deeper into my own mania, my own hysteria, but writing is the only way that I grip onto some semblance of sanity, as hard as I’m gripping my phone right now. I need to remind myself this is real, despite the dream-like numbness that’s taken over me. I bet that’s just exhaustion. Mental, physical, emotional exhaustion.

And why should I not be exhausted? No movie emphasises exactly how hard it hits you, when you see your childhood friend scrabbling for your throat. They don’t prepare you for this. They don’t tell you that your throat turns raw from screaming ‘It’s me! It’s me! Why are you doing this?’ and yet it keeps growling and rasping and advancing and you keep scrambling back, trying to stay out of reach, trying to see through the glaze of pain and fear and tears.

Fuck. What is my life?

I don’t want to write it down. It’s so absurd. It seems so absurd. But they say I should. The sooner I come to accept it, the stronger my survival instinct gets. Or something of the sort. I can’t start fighting till I admit to myself who I’m fighting against. Do I even want to fight? Fight or flee? Is it even a choice? Survival ranks highest. But yes- corpses. I was running from corpses. I was fighting corpses. Dead people.

Lifeless bodies fuelled by something dark. I hate this. I hate that I have to use these dramatic sounding words to describe my reality.

This is the reality of my situation. I am sitting hunched over my phone, trying to record this, typing furiously, trying to block out the pain that’s searing through my right thigh. They pulled out a fingernail from my thigh. Sidra’s fingernail. Fuck, I need to stop crying.

I’m sitting in the corner. They think I’m still in shock. I don’t know. I wish I could ask for morphine or something something anything for the pain that’s wringing me inside and out. Oh yes, they. They are the people who helped me up, shot Sidra in the chest and took me and my shredded thigh along with them. We’re in the basement of South City Hospital. The first question I asked them was about the morgue. I think they’d given up on getting me to talk by then. But the morgue is empty. I don’t know if that was supposed to reassure me or scare the fuck out of me. They said the basement is the safest place for us. So, we’re all here. We are those who are injured, but not as severely as the ones who lie thrashing upstairs.

I don’t think they’ve eliminated us as threats yet. Nobody knows how this works. Am I infected? Do I have something dark tunnelling through my veins?

Are any of us safe? I don’t know if the ones standing with the guns are protecting us from the ones outside these doors or they’re protecting them from us. I don’t know how this works. I don’t know how this works.

I don’t know where anyone is. I was waiting for Sidra in the café when this all happened. I don’t know when it happened. I should stop calling it by her name. It’s not really her. But it is, isn’t it?

I don’t know I don’t know.

Would it be that bad if I started foaming at the mouth right now? If all rationality was wiped out by bloodlust? I wouldn’t be aware of this, of whatever is happening right now. I wouldn’t be able to hear the screaming from outside or smell the fear emanating from everyone’s pores here.

I’m scared.

I’m cold. I’m tired. I’m thirsty.

Underneath my skin

Gargles the selfishness to prove myself above all, which

Lingers- corrodes hope in humanity- and erases

Yearning for a better tomorrow, untouched by the pus of pessimism.

I asked Ron what temptation was. As I asked, I watched the rising steam lifting gracefully from the heap of noodles, curled so perfectly, wound close and together. The lighting was dim in the restaurant and the smells were smoky and hot and spicy. My fingers were cold, my hand was warm, and I remember cherishing that feeling. Loving that feeling- the feeling of feeling two contradictory things at once, the feeling of loving two things at the same time.

I asked him what temptation was. He peered through the haze, squinting to discern whether I wanted a serious answer or a non-serious one. I looked him straight in the eyes. I carefully shuttered my face, counted the fluttering of my lashes and looked at him through the steam. I could see him struggling to come up with an answer. I stayed quiet. He finally sighed and said that temptation was the promise of a lie, the power to steal someone away.

As he thought aloud, I saw the steam drift lazily into a twisting, serpent-like Chinese dragon, with twirling whiskers, staring, snarling at me, and challenging me with flaring nostrils. Engaged in non-verbal combat, my hand fighting to stay relaxed we both stared steadily, creature and monster, eye to eye, even as my boyfriend’s face melted into a sea of red and warmth.

Later that night, feeling the warmth of his body reach out, seeking mine from under the covers, I shuffled away and schooled my breathing, waiting for the heat to stop being insisting. I took ten, twenty breaths, starting again from one once I reached twenty- I did it till I lost count, and then I counted once again- just in case. Then I got up and crept out of the room, not looking back even once. I stood near the fish tank, watching the fluttering gills of the resting catfish at the bottom. I stood there, letting the gargling of the filter flood my senses, louder and louder- and then I let myself think of temptation.

My temptation is to let go, to run free and fall. Fall, fall till I’m freefalling.

I did not tell Ron that he was not the first one I asked to define temptation. I asked the man with the greying hair first. I wouldn’t call him my lover, or my partner. He is a writer. A married, twenty years senior writer. A married man with children, a dog and a mortgage. He has me, too. We rarely talk about that. I am his editor, his proof reader- a young, twenty something fresh graduate who stresses too much and talks too less.

We have lunches together. A place of his choice, always. Coffee houses, cafés and the like. He detests Chinese and Thai. We talk about work, about our lives, about much more. He encourages me to ask questions. There is never a lull in our conversations. I ask mundane questions, questions I’ve never asked, personal questions, and one day, feeling specially daring, I asked him about temptation.

He paused. He doesn’t pause much. He always gives his answers carefully, thinking and then speaking. I have never seen him pause, though. He paused and stirred his coffee. Decaf, always. He looked up at me and spoke. Our gazes locked and heat pooled in my stomach. My fingers trembled and I had to bite my lower lip to keep it still. I wanted to look away, to hide under the table, to breathe till my face cooled down. He likes me to look at him while we talk. I didn’t look away.

He said temptation is giving power to something else, something that breaks our free will to resist. When I asked him, I looked at him over a slice of red velvet cheesecake, through clear air spiced with the fragrance of coffee and cinnamon, and I let everything fall away but him, and everything was background, but us.

The tips of his fingers touched mine, stayed and then twitched away. He said he wasn’t my temptation, because he’d never make me leave.

I tempt him all the time.

I am self-destructive, giving into impulses, jumping and falling and waiting to see what and who falls after me. He is the one who steps in and catches me and holds me before I jump. He scolds me, lets me cry and doesn’t let go. My temptation keeps me from giving in.

My temptation is my saviour.