It's almost been a year since you died.
I miss you both. So much, so interwoven, so that I can't even sort out who I am talking to sometimes. Maybe it doesn't matter, but I hope you're not offended if it does. You're everywhere, and nowhere, and I don't know how to deal with it.
Last Sunday, I went to Wal-Mart late at night, alone, and there was this guy who walked like you. It was so devastatingly familiar that your name pounded across my heart, rose up in my throat, to my lips, where it died just like you did when he turned and his face was all edges at the wrong places and mean expressions and not you at all.
Last Monday, I helped a patient onto a toilet, and she gripped my hand and her eyes were the exact same color and shape as yours were, and I flashed back in my memory to a night where I was 12 and selfish and refusing to believe that you were really that sick and really that helpless as I rushed through drying off after a shower as Dad banged on the door because you needed to get in RIGHT NOW and you couldn't get to the downstairs one, so I huffed under my breath as I walked across the living room and Mom told me how it was and I hated her for making me know that you really were THAT sick and weak and I wish I could go back and be kinder and better but I can't, so I checked on that patient every half hour instead of every two to make sure she didn't need help that wasn't there because I hope somehow you see and know that I am sorry.
I used to think it got better, you know?
But the truth of it is, it just hurts for so long that your heart goes into shock again, and numbs you until something stabs the wounds, making them urgent and violent and reminding you of all of the pain you've been ignoring for forever.
It's hard to live when your soul feels like warm Swiss Cheese, flimsy and sticky and full of holes where you should be. It's hard to breathe without you here with me. I have been trying to just not stop. Constant motion, constant studying and school and work and kids and please don't let me think about it please don't let me think about it please don't let me think about how you're both gone and left me behind and is it crazy to be jealous of two dead people or is it crazy to hope that I am dreaming, all of this is just a dream and I'll wake up in a white room with slanted ceilings and clowns stenciled around the top and you'll be there and somehow I will make sure you both are okay if I just stay in this dream long enough to find a cure for you and another cure for you and it will all be fine.
This morning, my son told me there was a little girl in the room with him, and I smelled you and I cried the whole way to work, where I found a decomposing Pokemon card in front of my car and thought about sitting at a picnic table in front of our house while you changed the rules and took both of our cards, but I didn't really know how to play and only wanted to because you thought it was cool and I wanted you to think I was cool. So I picked it up and kept it with me, like somehow you left it from a memory that only I have now.
I feel as though I am the only one in the world who feels like this; I am on the edge of a cliff with fog all around me, and your absence has sank into my body and manifested in sores in my mouth and the cracks under my nose and the vessels bursting red in my eyes, and I could scream into an abyss until my throat, raw with grief, bleeds out and I fall off.
Where are you?
I wish you would come back to me.
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