I often feel like I am living in a different world entirely. I exist in one where you were here, and then you weren’t. This is a feeling others cannot understand. People who never knew you, after all, never will.
My friends don’t ask me how I am dealing with your death anymore. I didn’t know how to act the first time they asked, nor the hundredth time; so I guess I prefer things this way.
(And back then, when it happened, I was a very different person. So I have to be sure people know that, all the time;
I am different now, and so I have to be on my best behavior.
To be great, you must be quiet.
I do not brand myself as being a person you left behind, at least not in public.)
When my grandmother died on New Years, I didn’t eat right for months. But I did not go out and get wasted, or hook up with strangers, or cut my arms to shreds, or any of those things I did when you died.
This troubles me often. The lack of recklessness.
Did I get it out of my system back then? All of it, forever? Is my response, or lack of it, indicative of how much I cared for the two of you?
Should I feel guilty for the stability? Ashamed of my sobriety?
Does making lunch prove I was soulless or indifferent? Or worse, that I am, present-tense and all?
At times I can’t cry at all, and then I can’t stop crying. With you, though, it was never ending. I cried until I threw up, over and over again –
Am I just older now, or did your death desensitize me?
Why does it feel hypocritical and melodramatic to struggle, and simultaneously egregious to not?
When I can’t sleep, I walk around my house, but sometimes it’s yours as well. I pretend I am a ghost, haunting my childhood home. Tile floors, beige walls, lace trimmings. I remember those years vividly. The good and the bad. I feel myself slipping in between the cracks. Towards you, then away. I float in and out of those years, and those houses.
I took K2 once, by accident. I saw your face imprinted in the walls. I was very scared, then.
I can’t smoke weed anymore because I feel like it’s happening again, that moment where I realized I couldn’t back out. There were so many moments I could not back out of.
Finality.
In the mirror I tell myself I am not suspended in time. That if I was, I would be acting differently. I count each finger to my thumb. One to ten. This is to ensure I am not dreaming. This is what self-soothing looks like.
I tell myself I no longer put on an act; this is only partially true.
I am terrified of anything that ends.
There is moss growing over the building that caved in on itself before I ever got there. There’s so much graffiti that it’s impossible to kid yourself about what has happened in its walls.
I went back there after you passed and laid straight on the concrete floor of it. I pretended I was the dead center of a ritual. If I laid there long enough, I would disappear.
A spider crawled next to me and it scared me bad enough to make me leave. If you’re too scared of a spider to let it crawl on you, you are too scared to see what happens following the end of it all. I know this. That’s why I never could do it, not fully; pull the trigger. Metaphorically. Literally. You know.
Were you scared? This question haunts me.
The effects of you ripple through most things.
I don’t blame you for what you did. Still, I don’t know where to put the anger, or any of the grosser feelings. Shame. Embarrassment. I rehash my own emotional response to it, again and again. I berate myself for the feelings I do not deserve.
I feel guilty for the times I toyed with the idea of finality; it isn’t right that only one of us made it past twenty. Shouldn’t I have gone first? Wouldn’t it have swayed you to see the affects of loss?
I think you could’ve lived a better life than I have. I can’t say for certain.
There are no ways of knowing. There are no right answers.
It’s been many years since.
Please forgive me for this selfishness.
