When I Was Whole (And When I Fell Apart)

1 - Une

        Laurence was no poet.

        For all the raging storms and bright sunshine tumbling within him, he had no talent for pouring feelings to paper, no similes or metaphors for the ever-growing cacophony of emotions swirling inside like a hurricane. Poets were those who could make worlds out of words, pictures out of ink-stained fingers, and string together an entire universe with a single stroke of their pen.

        And yet as he held the bouquet of flowers close to his chest, the thin paper scrunching beneath his iron grip as the rose petals shook violently in his shaking palms, he thought he might as well be one. Put words to describe the stifled sobs in his throat, the way his eyes watered as he stood at the helm of a church pew, the dread that clawed at his stomach and swallowed him whole.

        Please, he pleaded with the world, please be only sleeping.

        He watched his father, his beautiful, sleeping father, his usual dark brown locks slicked back unnaturally clean, so unlike the man he once was.

        Still was, he had to remind himself, his father was only sleeping.

        This was the man who'd ruffle his hair and allow him gentle sips of his disgustingly black coffee in the early mornings, hair untangled and free as he threw on his blindingly white medical coat and crooked metal-rimmed glasses, coming home smelling of hospital sanitizer as he caught Laurence in a big hug.

        He looked so calm, features still and peaceful in the gentle light, and yet he was so, so terrifying within that wooden coffin, lying within the confines of nails and planks, it's exterior painted black and interior lined with white velvet. His father's new suit adorned the corpse on his deathbed, a corpse that wasn't his father, could not be his father, lest he breaks himself at the suppressed memory of a flat line blaring across the heart monitor near a hospital bed.

        Laurence held back a choked sob, flowers falling to his feet like stones upturned from a roaring river. He clutched his unruly dark blonde strands in his bloodied hands, clawing at tears that kept flowing, an endless waterfall that just wouldn't stop.

        He always was the sensitive one, out of his siblings.

        Elisabeth, his sister whose face betrayed no sense of emotion, only eyes too reminiscent of their father's and dark hair a mirror image of the man in the coffin, slowly lifted a hand to rest on his shoulder. Her bottom lip was trembling as the pastor recited the last of his sermon, laying a hand above the man who should be sleeping–sleeping, Laurence kept muttering to himself like a madman, sleeping, only sleeping–not displayed raw and bare in front of a weeping crowd in a foreign casket.

        His chest shakily drew out shallow exhales, leaving him gasping for more oxygen to fill his trembling lungs. He grasped onto Elisabeth's hand like a lifeline, her body stiff and cold, like the brunt of a snowstorm in the middle of a chilly December.

        And how he wished for it all to stop.

        But it didn't stop when they lowered his father's body to the ground, his coffin now covered in layers and layers of moist earth.

        It didn't stop when he threw the now crumpled bouquet of roses atop the freshly made grave, eyes red and puffy from tears.

        It didn't stop when Elisabeth walked wordlessly out of the funeral home doors, each step echoing across the tiled floor like a silent protest.

        It didn't stop when his family of four, once their family of five, sat quiet and mournful on the car ride home, the silence thick and suffocating around their throats.

        It didn't stop when the baby began wailing and crying in their mother's arms, oblivious to the agonizing grief creeping upon those dressed in black.

        And it didn't stop when his mother, their mother, finally let her carefully composed facade shatter like porcelain as she fell to her knees, sobbing and crying to the world at the unfairness of it all.

        If he had to pinpoint the exact moment his life fell apart, it would be that day in their two-story home, devoid of the man he once called his father.