Anthological

Metaphors

Words: 1060

          5.      ashes to ashes, dust to dust

          You meet your father for the first time in a few years at the funeral and for the first time in a few weeks something other than utter sorrow resonates through your brain. Rage flows through your veins, all the rage that your half-collapsing grieving body can handle, because only now, now that it's too late did your father come, too little too late. He tries to talk with you and you don't say anything, and when he pulls you into a hug you just stay rigid before he lets go, your arms at your sides and never touching his back.

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            You walk along the sidewalk, just looking at everything. It's lightly  raining and you have a hoodie on and if your life was a movie this would be the part where sad music plays in the background and a tear slips down your cheek and everybody watching feels sorry for you.  Life doesn't work that way and the only music playing is from people inside houses doing people-inside-house things and people outside houses doing people-outside-house things. A few people offer you a smile or a nod or a pitying look or all of them and you offer them your tired smiles and nods right back. It's a small subdivision, everybody knows most everybody and they know what happened to you and they know to leave you alone. 

           You turn around the corner and someone who hasn't seen you since before the accident (that isn't too surprising, it's only been a month and you don't go out much) nods at you, and says some things you tune out. I'm sorry for your loss, maybe. He was a good kid. He's in a better place.  You smile at them and say thank you, and when you blink the next second they mistake it for blinking back tears even though it isn't and they pull you into a hug. You stand limply until they let go and then walk away. Only few people have heard what was said but you're pretty sure that everybody on the street knows what happened. Another round of pitying looks and condolences are given as you walk by and you feel something resembling relief when you turn around another corner. 

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                  You've always liked metaphors, being a writer. It makes things easier to understand, to digest. You start to like them a little less when you start to think of things using the thing, the person, you've lost. That was his favourite colour, you think, passing by something red. He used to always play with this toy, passing by a toy car. He would have loved to learn all of this, studying outer space in class. Your thoughts, when not drenched in grief, gets drenched in he would've loved this or he would've hated that or he used to love this or he used to hate that until everything is a metaphor, a metaphor for him. 

                 It gets progressively worse and there comes a point where whenever you do something you think he could do it worse or he could do it better and that's when you acknowledge this isn't healthy.  But whenever you try stop it, you just get hit with this is what he would've wanted me to do resonating through your head and you feel like you can't stop thinking and you sink just a little bit deeper into insanity and you think he's probably deeper in the ground and you just can't. Stop. Thinking.

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                     You stare straight ahead when the teacher talks with no indication that you're listening. The teachers don't pester you for answers and the people who used to crowd around you avoid looking you in the eye and pester somebody else. You stand in front of them and say a firm no while still looking straight at the ground and they scurry away immediately and the girl they were about to insult hugs you with tears running down her face soaking into her shirt. She says thank you enough times to thank Santa for every kid he made a gift for and you wait outside while she fixes herself in the bathroom. She silently walks with you to class and maybe this would be the first friend to not run away.

                     Math class is both the hardest to suffer through. You copy down numbers and symbols and write more numbers and symbols to get the correct numbers and symbols so that the numbers and symbols on your report card will be satisfactory to your teachers and parents. Still, the difficulty helps you not think about anything else for a while and you just thank the stars that you weren't born intelligent enough that this was easy. If this was easy, that would give you more time to think in metaphors of him. 

Numbers would do. Numbness would be preferred.

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                              It's his birthday and you don't bother going to school. Your teachers were his teachers too and they know and they won't begrudge this. You look at your mother's tear-streaked face behind a bottle of liquor and with a pack of cigarettes underneath and you get out of the house as quickly as you could, who cares if it's five AM. You know the whole family will be going to the cemetery later but you can't wait, you want a few hours of silence. You send a text to the one friend you have telling her to meet you there and she arrives thirty minutes later. You nod at each other and you stop at the grave. His grave.

                                  He doesn't like flowers, so you just grab a pretty branch with leaves in his favourite colours (red, yellow, orange) and lay it in front of the grave, and the silence stings in your ears. Your friend, beside you the entire time, gathers up courage and hugs you, whispering I'm sorry about your brother.

                                   You sit down and start talking to the grave as if it was him but without a single hello, because he didn't have time to form a clear personality and so somehow became part of yours, and saying hello to a part of you would be ludicrous. So you sit there, a branch at your knees and somebody by your side and metaphors, brothers, and unfettered grief swirling around your head.