Wearing My Smile | ✔

Friday, January 8th, 1999

Late afternoon

You were staring at the empty wall when I ran over to you in the hospital hallway, Luce right behind me. Sitting alone right outside your mom's room, not saying anything, completely unresponsive to any movements or sound, time passed and it was as if you stayed there suspended in time. You didn't even notice me until I shook your shoulders and you stared at me blankly with your glazed eyes. I called your name over and over until you looked up and found me. There was this odd fear in me. Something that told me you'd left already and I wasn't there to tell you to come back.

But you came back to me, I saw it in your eyes when your pain came rushing into you and it ached for me. I asked you where your father was because surely, he was around here somewhere? You shook your head no. You said simply, “Gone.” and I couldn't understand that, I couldn't understand what it meant.

I glanced at Luce. She took a peek into the door's window and shook her head at me, not saying anything. I couldn't comprehend the look on her face. Something like pity and sadness and anger and disgust. I couldn't understand why you were sitting out there alone, why you shook your head, but I was shaking when I took a seat right beside you—my body understood what my mind could not.

“I'll get you boys some drink,” Luce told us gently right before she left, and I thought at the time how it was just like her to think of the simple and practical things other people didn't think they needed. A couple of minutes later you stood to walk away from your mother's room, so abruptly I couldn't do anything but follow.

I looked at you as we stopped right before a group of family. Little boys running around a man who seemed to be their father and a woman smiling down softly to a bundle of blanket in her arms. Little fingers reached out and touched her nose. She kissed them, cooing, humming. A picture of contentment playing cruelly in a never-ending loop.

You watched the scene with that expression on your face: a mix of sadness, anger, and longing—so much longing that you refused to talk about. I could see your fists tightening on your sides, your chest rising and falling because you were overwhelmed by this hunger that you knew would never be fulfilled, and wasn't that just terrible? To always be starved of something you couldn't have?

I couldn't imagine it then, but I can imagine it now, you seeing your reflection in the mirror years later, hating it before shattering it with your knuckles. I could imagine you walking hand in hand with your little brother, or sister, in a couple of years after then if they'd been born at all. I could imagine you loving them with what was left inside you, which wasn't much, but you'd give them everything you had, anyway. I could imagine you smiling radiantly. You, my soft-hearted friend, who was so lonely and in pain, who just wanted to love and be loved back.

The scene played over and over until the group went away and we were still standing in that hospital hallway, staring at the emptiness they left behind. I held your hand but you didn't notice. You were staring at nothing, your mind was hundreds miles away.

“Sam,” I croaked because I didn't know what to do.

I felt you gripping my hand back. “Yes.”

“I'm sorry.”

Your tears came then, dripping ceaselessly down to your chin. You didn't even sob. “I don't understand this.”

“Understand what?”

“How anyone could be this sad and still breathing.”

Nothing changed. Nothing was fixed. Perhaps the fact that you had just lost a sibling without having a chance to know them at all was just another point in your long list of unattainable dreams. But when I wrapped my arms around you and held you, you clutched onto me like I was your anchor when you were about to float away. You sobbed onto my shoulders, this big whacking sob that shook your whole body, and I held you still.

Nothing was okay, but I had you, Sam. I always had you. For a second there, I thought it was enough.