Open When I'm Gone

3. Fade Away.

The next two weeks are the hardest of my life, That's for certain. Hanson calls me eight days later with an impossible question.

"Hey man," He called me at exactly 1:29 Pm. I keep track. "Do you think... Do you want... Can you come help us clean out Eddy's room?"

You know that feeling, when you get punched in the gut, and all the air just kinda... goes out of you? That's how I felt.

How could I stand in her room, where she should be but isn't and go through her things? Take everything she owned, everything that mattered to her, and decide what parts were meaningful and what parts she kept for sentimental value alone?

But... Even though they don't want to admit it, Hanson and Graham didn't know Eddy as well as I did, and she would want me to go.

My hand's tremble as I knock on the door. It makes me think of Eddy, and how her hands used to shake because of her condition. She used to laugh about it, how she would spill her drinks and wasn't able to write by herself, even in the early stages. It was never funny, and we all knew it, but as they say 'it's better to laugh than cry.'

Hanson opens the door, his hair disheveled and the bags under his eyes looking more like bruises.

"Hey, Simon," He mumbled, rubbing his eyes. "Hey, yeah, come in, come in,"

A heavy fog hits me as I enter the house. A feeling of being choked as you walk in. It almost brings me to my knees.

"Dad's upstairs," He barely looks at me as he shuffles up the stairs, hands in his pocket, hair ratted to his skull. He looks like he hasn't slept in weeks.

"Hanson, are you doing okay?"Although I already know the answer.

"Yup. Just haven't slept in a bit."

Of course he hasn't. His sister just died, what else could be expected? I haven't slept in days either.

The only way I can describe Eddy's room as we walk in is dead. When I enter through her pale purple doorway, I see her bed has been stripped of her sage duvet and her chest of drawers all opened with her clothes strewn on the floor. Her small collection of pristine stuffed animals, usually in her wicker basket in the corner, had been displayed across her windowsill. Her paintings have been taken down from the walls, the only thing still hung up was her large collage of pictures and book quotes.

And so. Many. Pictures. Of. Us.

I didn't realize she had so many of us. From our hiking trips before she got sick to the hours of board games and movies we played while she was in the hospital. She has pictures from all of our school dances, all of our dates. Every single moment it seems, is documented in her pictures. Some of these I don't even remember her taking, but she always was taking photos, she loved photography. She always said a picture can hold a thousand words, I never realized that until now.

I suck in a deep breath. "What do we still have to do?"

Graham smiles weakly at me, "You can grab whatever you want of hers to keep, and then we still have all the boxes under the bed to unpack."

He hands me an empty medium sized cardboard with my name scrawled on the front. "Just grab some things that you think she would want you to have." Graham sounds... exhausted, like he wears everything on his shoulders and it's breaking him.

There is absolutely nothing I can say, so I kneel down on her yellow shag rug and begin going through one of her plastic bins where she kept everything under her bed.

The entire time I'm digging through the bins, putting things in separate piles for donation, I'm feeling what I imagine it feels like to have a wrench continuously slammed into my gut. Every single item I pull out is something she loved, every single article of clothing and picture and book and playbill she cherished deeply. It's like searching through her inner workings and deciding which parts of her were worth keeping.