Bittersweet: A True Story of Love and Loss by Bowser Lotte

Author:Bowser, Lotte [Bowser, Lotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2024-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

13

I don’t know how we got home, or how we passed the time until the evening – chunks of time and memory ripped from me. I lay in bed as darkness fell, and a kind of madness ensued. I drifted in and out of sleep, tormented by images of his lifeless body and grey eyes. ‘Where are you?’ I cried as I thrashed about in agony, the shards of glass still buried under my skin, every last movement driving them deeper. What had they done with him? Was he in a body bag, in a refrigerator somewhere, reduced to a number on a tag? How could he have been here one minute, only to have disappeared in a puff of smoke the next? He was alive just yesterday. He was breathing – albeit mechanically – but he was breathing . None of it made any sense.

When daylight began to seep through the gap in the curtains, I rolled over and reached for my phone on the floor beside the bed. It was six o’clock in the morning, and Jaz was fast asleep next to me. The ‘recent calls’ page flashed up as I unlocked my screen. Annie was the last person I’d called. When did I speak to Annie? I wondered. I clicked on the ‘Info’ icon next to her name. ‘I’m right there with you,’ came her voice again in my mind. Seventeen minutes. I’d spoken to her for seventeen minutes in Ben’s hospital room, and I hadn’t remembered a thing besides those words.

I dragged my thumb upwards to the home screen. There were hundreds of notifications on WhatsApp and Instagram. ‘NO,’ I gasped. A wave of dread flooded my body. England was seven hours ahead of Tijuana, and the news had spread throughout the day well before I’d hoped it would. A friend of Ben’s had found out from Ben’s family, and had already told his contacts in the music industry. But it wasn’t your news to share , I thought to myself, scrolling through dozens and dozens of messages. I’d wanted to craft a statement of some kind. I’d wanted people to hear it from me , but only when I felt ready to share it, if at all. Maybe if I held off a bit longer, it would make it feel less real. Maybe I could even keep pretending that it hadn’t happened, that it was just a nightmare I hadn’t woken up from yet.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ somebody wrote. I clicked through to the article they’d sent me from the BBC – ‘UK Music Agent Ben Kouijzer Dies in Mexico Aged 36’.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ I cried. Why did they have to be so literal about it? Why couldn’t they have written something less violent, like ‘Ben Kouijzer Passes Away’? As if different wording would make it feel less final. As if there were varying degrees of dead.

‘He was so loved,’ wrote somebody else.

I heaved a loud ‘fuck off’ at my phone. Why the hell were they using past tense? He didn’t belong in yesterday.

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