Almost a Year Since He Died.
Nothing makes it easier, but if it’s possible to rebound from the sudden death of someone you love, you must be on the upswing.
Your adaptive body has revealed its defense mechanisms, physical manifestations of shock and devastation. But the ten pounds that stacked the curve of your hip have started to slide off the bone. A forest of baby hairs starts repopulating the bald patch near your temple. You look in the mirror and see someone who is healing.
Saying the words “My Brother passed away” has become a surreal routine your mouth performs. Every time the phrase takes shape, tongue knocking into familiar grooves, you disconnect. The flickering tongue that grew with your bones, the vengeful adult teeth that shoved their baby counterparts out, they are foreign enamel soldiers, delivering your message without you.
And, in a strange way, you’ve gotten used to it; you say this phrase often now, and can look straight ahead while doing so. The pain no longer chokes you every time you remember he’s gone. It used to, but you’ve gotten stronger. Skin thicker, eyes duller, heartbeat jaded to a cautionary trot, its red sweat just a little saltier.
The whiplash of loss is laced with lessons. Coming to terms with life’s fragility forces you to love more presently, to hold those close to you tighter. But it’s also also a leash, letting out slack and then ripping you back, a studded reminder that nothing, and no one, lasts forever. A feedback loop without end; a black moon orbiting a broken heart.
You seek connection in every glance, as if the combined love of strangers can fill the space he left behind. While you try to plug the leak of that love, you fall in love too often and too frivolously. Several stumbles have taught you to guard your heart more discriminately than ever. Substitute love is a welcome distraction, but one that seems to prop you up only until it’s crushed by the arc of expectation. No one will ever be able to give you what you’ve lost.
You fight for power with his ghost every day. He floats around your memory from the moment the day begins, condensation in empty coffee cups, a fog on picture frames. Some days you can tiptoe past, others you smack straight into him, paralyzed in a collision with memory.
In his car, you feel connected to him. When you open the sleeve to the bill of sale in the glovebox that was once his, a smell peels out with the papers. A sweet, soft musk, attributed only to him, and it overwhelms your olfactory sense like an actual embrace. For a split second, he is alive, skin still pink, eyes still glossy and blue.
Yet, his imprint in the coop’s leather seats is fading. Once you learned to shift gears, his clutch stopped missing him. Once you signed the papers his glovebox let go of his name. The mirrors have tightened their grip and the glovebox scent has faded away. You only find comfort in the tacky sticker on the rear bumper, a dancing, tiny devil, that will always be his. Like a regrettable tattoo from a past life, it is permanent, will stay permanent.
It’s been 10 months since you’ve talked to him and you can’t fucking believe it. You miss his calls, crackling with laughter over international phone lines. You miss his hard-to-place accent, his endless rolodex of slang, a weird patchwork of all the places he’d lived, its timbre as unique as that life.
Online, it doesn’t matter that he’s dead. Alex’s name is always there, on the top of every contact list, as if alphabetical order was playing a sick joke on you. Next to the little avatar he picked is a photo you took of him on vacation years and years ago. It’s both a relief and a torment to know that here his identity is unchanged: no little green online icon will ever come on, but his name will remain, forever.
His notebooks, meticulously detailing his years, are an open invitation. You pore over the pages, watching his cursive change shapes, following the pattern of his lettering, soaking up every little detail. You’re surprised by some of the things he deemed noteworthy — slight observations, field recordings and mindless gossips, all dated and signed. You’re grateful for the peek into his mind and through his days.
You realize that so much of his life was a mystery to you. There was only so much that you knew about the minutiae, his big-picture dreams, the comings and goings of his love, the truth.
His friends become the missing puzzle pieces, little slivers of him tucked into them, in their tattoos, their inside jokes, their hearts. You feel lucky to have a family in the people that loved him. You travel to see the people that knew him. You’re humbled by the dedication they pin to his memory, and their generosity with you transcends courtesy. You feel him in their gaze and in their grip, and they catch glimmer of him in you.
And while parts of you feel that they are moving forward, there is more regret than ever. You regret not calling every week, or even every month. You regret not inviting him to be by your side during the best moments of your life. You regret not being there the night that he died.
Call life unfair because it took him everyone he loved too soon. But your lives overlapped for 27 and a half years. When you visualize two bars running in place and one suddenly stopping flat, while the other goes on and on and on, you shatter.
And though it will never be enough, you force yourself to appreciate the long life that you did have together; jogging in parallel for over a quarter of a century. A quarter century of more laughs, more oceans, more kitty cats, more counting shooting stars while curled up on the trampoline than most lives ever get to share together.
And who knows if once his bar stops in this chart it passes the ballot, picking up elsewhere, from a sprint into a soar. You open your heart and mind to this possibility: that he is no longer confined, that he has become a force, not seen, but felt, spreading across unruled pages in a notebook you can’t even fathom.
You find that once you let this idea in, it casts all of your life in technicolor, now and what must be forever. You can find him lost in adventures in dreams. You can feel him in the seat beside you while winding down the Pacific Coast. Instead of plugging the holes in your heart, you channel them into vases. Roses the color of your blood bloom. You feed your memory, and nurture your loss, every day. You can find him everywhere you are; in the present, not just in the past.
I miss you so much, Alex. Almost a year since you died, I see you in everything.
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