Yaaburnee

Bury Me First

A WORD ENGLISH NEVER MADE · READ THE CUSTOMS HOUSE

Arabic. Literally you bury me. The wish to die before someone you love, so you never have to survive them.

The word

Arabic, literally you bury me. A Levantine term of endearment spoken to someone loved: may I die first, because a life after you is the worse death. Grief volunteered in advance, as a gift.

The feeling

It surfaces in the middle of ordinary happiness, watching someone laugh, and tips straight into vertigo: the knowledge that one of you goes first. The love and the dread are the same object seen from two sides. It is heaviest exactly where the love is best.

Against its neighbours

Love is the ground it stands on; yaaburnee is love doing the arithmetic of mortality. Grief follows a death. Yaaburnee rehearses one on purpose, and calls the rehearsal devotion.

In the work

Devotion with mortality inside it. It appears where a work is tender and terrified at once, protective of something it knows it will lose.

3 works composed with Yaaburnee

Composed with

Also in Rare-Liminal

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