No Words

      My brother died.  People have been asking me how I'm doing.  At first, there are no words.  They elude you.  Even simple objects cease to have names.  You sit and stare into a swollen silence.  It hangs heavy in the air like a thick, suffocating fog.  And then the words come and they don't feel real.  My brother died.  Those words shouldn't exist.  To speak those words is to use air that I no longer have. But you need to attach words to your suffering so that it doesn't eat you alive.  My brother died.  Now I walk through life a ghost--a shell of the person I used to be.  My heart is a leaden anchor weighing me down.  My soul has been ransacked of whatever was left.  I am afraid of this sadness. My heart feels like it is starving to death; that low, deep rumbling moan, that dull ache of need.  But there is nothing to fill it. What it needs is no longer here.  Assuming I live to be old, I do the calculations in my head of how long I have to be here without my brother. It's too long.  I can't call you anymore.  I can't give you a stupid haircut.  You can't force me to eat food that that I don't want to eat.  Everything feels old and used up, lackluster.  It's fucked up.  I'm fucked up.  I awake in panic in the middle of the night because this world is not my world anymore.  My life, my home, our parents home...it's all foreign to me now, like everything is made of paper and I can tear right through it.  And on the other side of it is a vast darkness, and you.  An infinite expanse of stars.  You get to be that now.  For me, you get to be every sunbeam that stretches out an arm towards my face, every beautiful snowflake, every breeze that shakes the tall trees.  And when there are no words, there you'll be. And that shall be my solace.