Something about time makes me feel like I have to tighten my fist around it. Like there won’t ever be enough. This year, I kept forgetting which anniversary we were approaching. When I was in the trenches of early grief, I thought that was the hard part. The firsts, the seconds, the whiplash. But then that number keeps getting bigger. This year, I found myself saying fifteen – no wait, sixteen – sixteen? Sixteen. Sixteen years without you. And just like every year, I have to remind myself that we have to do it all over again. The realizing. That you’re still gone, and we’re still here. And I have to learn how to loosen my stubborn chokehold on time, because it’s May again. It’s always May again.
Some years, I’ve shown up to this day angry. Others, just devastatingly sad. This year, round sixteen, I feel defiant. I am insistent upon being aggressively, spitefully alive. This year, I decided to stop saving things for special occasions. Life is the occasion. We, alive, here and now, are the occasion. So I romanticize my morning coffee. This journal. This pen. The bowl of strawberries. The downward dog. The way a silk scrunchie feels on my wrist.
There are things I wish I could show you, pieces of your 26-year-old daughter’s life. Soft tank tops tucked into high wasted sweatpants. Beer and kiwis in the fridge. My yoga mat rolled up against the bar cart, stacks of books on the floor. Sweet rhythm with the love of my life. The fact that you two will never meet, at least in this life, is still bitter. Still tender, still a wound. I sip from my water bottle and light a joint. My hand reaches out to pass it to you.
I think you would have been fierce. The dad in a movie I watch says his daughter is smart and talented and I miss you for the first time in a while. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I miss you on the inside of my bones every second I’m alive. But for the first time in a while, I feel like you could be here. You could be next to me. You could say your daughter is smart and talented. And I think you would have been fierce.
I feel old watching the movie, relating to 16-year-olds on the screen and seeing this four-years-away-from-30 woman’s reflection in the window. But feeling old is a gift. Feeling anything is such a huge fucking gift.
This year, I spend a lot of time thinking about what’s left behind. The everything else. The four of us – Ammi, Bhai, Apa, and me – and our growing lives. I know some pieces of our grief-splattered memories disappear and we don’t know how much we should be missing them because we don’t even remember that they happened. Like the night we four stayed up late playing Harry Potter Scene-It and it was 1 AM on a school night but Ammi said it was okay. I don’t remember what year it was. I don’t remember anything else.
On my hopeful, well-adjusted days, I know that TV isn’t real. That we, too, would be beautiful laughing slow motion in well-edited lighting. That everything ends, one way or another. I think about things that happened after you were gone but you were there, too, in the room with us. Summer Scrabble game nights with Dairy Queen Blizzard runs in between. Piggy back rides from one end of the house to the other. Getting day-old bread and Coke from Jimmy John’s on the way to the Quincy Public Library, which probably only happened once but I remember the song we sang and the view of the console from the backseat, my siblings’ shoulders, and that feeling of innocent adventure. I know that we grew up because we had to. After you, without you, and around you. And we all try our best to be alive together.
I wish I could give my sister another prom, one that you pick her up from like you were supposed to. I wish I could sit with my brother on that three-hour drive he made alone from Champaign, hold his hand, look out for cops so he could speed if he wanted to. I wish I could give my mother everything.
But then there’s everything else. The fact that even though I’ve run out of pictures, I see you every time I look in the mirror. Growing with me. I sit in coffee shops and hear something about soy milk and think about the man you had left to become. I wear your shirt and say thanks, it’s my dad’s. Your birthstone, in your mother’s ring, is always on my hand. The picture of us over my speedometer that I’ll have to find a new spot for in New York, because I’m leaving the car behind but I’m taking you with me. You are here. And we are alive together.
noor of my heart 