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It’s crushing. The carbon-cut hole straight through his chest. It never will be the same, not really. But he isn’t about to let what’s inside spill out. So he finds ways to patch it, with leather jackets or motorcycle talk, overly inflated Elvis obsessions and miscellaneous one night stands. And it works, or from the outside at least. The leaking is so slow, like a defective drain in a pool, so tiny and timeless that it seems he doesn’t even notice it until he’s empty again. Swimming in a half full pool is one thing. Not as enjoyable as a full one, but manageable for sure. But jumping into the deep end when there's not a drop of water left, that’s a whole different thing all together. And he’d jumped in face first, which is how he found himself back at the house, lying on Danny’s freshly waxed kitchen floor, skipping out on family day when everyone else was out having a blast.
They all thought he had run to grab more pop. A part of him knows they’ll be upset and worried when he doesn’t come back, but he just can’t take it anymore. It just all feels so wrong. Having a ‘family day’, when the largest, strongest, binding member of their family is missing. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Yes, a part of him knows she would want him to be out having fun. Wouldn’t have wanted this to have affected him so deeply. Wouldn’t have known this would have even affected him to half the extent it already had. But whether or not he’ll ever admit it, this was the wasn’t just the worst thing that had ever happened in his life, it was the biggest thing. It shaped him, deforming his mind and moulding him into who he had become. And another part of him made this seem like maybe it would never get better. If the hole would never fill, and the searing pain would always find a way to return, as if it was being freshly cut no matter what he tried to patch it with, was there even any point of patching it at all?
And moving on, what even was that? Where was the meaning there? He was supposed to move on, get past it and find a replacement or whatever all that crap was people said to him. But how do you move on from something that keeps going? It’s not just that Pam died, and then it was over. No, it wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t like finishing a grade in school, when you get your report card and finish all of your work before you move to the next one. No, it wasn’t like that in the least.
To start, he had never ‘finished’ his relationship with her. To say it had been left open-ended would be putting it lightly. He hadn’t even seen her in years, he’d talked to her over the phone occasionally, but grown up lives and grown up priorities had pushed connecting and rekindling the tight relationship they’d once had out of the picture. He hadn’t even met Michelle until after it had happened. That’s how long he’d been out of the picture. So in a way, he supposed people might say it should even be easier for him. Because that chapter of the book that been closed in advance. It wasn’t like what Danny and the girls had, how they would see her every day and every night.
But that was the reason, the abandoned closeness, the forgotten spark. That was the reason that it stung so bad and cut so deep. Because he knew he could have fixed it if he’d wanted to. And it that chapter wasn’t closed, it was an ongoing thing. Who would come visit who first, who’d be the first one to use the phone and call the other up. It was an unspoken game of chess, really. Being careful not to cross the boundaries pre-set by them by the rules of adulthood. Because adult siblings don’t hang out anymore. They weren’t supposed to. They were supposed to get their own lives, and move away from their families. Make their own new ones. Grow up. That was how it was supposed to go down. You finish your childhood sibling stage, and you move on to something new.
But a part of him knew that it had never really finished, and it never really would.
And what on earth was he supposed to ‘move on’ to? Were they expecting him to just get a new sister? What did that even mean? He knew that no mater how hard he tried, no mater how desperately he patched her cut up, and filled the gap with everything people told him he should be focusing on, that moving on would never be an option.
You don’t just move on from something like this. It happens, and it’s in your life forever. That’s just how it is. It becomes a part of you. A part so heavy, so annoyingly distracting and disabling, that you wish you could just leave it behind. You really do. You wish you didn’t have to drag it around with you everywhere you went. But you also know you can’t do that. Because then you’d be forgetting it, and in turn forgetting them.
He realized that. Whether or not people saw it, he was a smart guy.
What he didn’t realize, was that so many years later, it didn’t stay with him in the same way he had expected. No, it had grown and morphed into something so huge, something he didn’t even recognize. Seeing the shadow of her stand over him every single day, in every single activity. He just couldn’t handle it anymore.
He knew that he couldn’t remove this from his life. But he couldn’t remove himself from his life, either. He’d seen it first hand, what happens when someone dies. It doesn’t affect them. It affects the people around them.
So, as he lay there on the floor, knowing no one was going to come get him, knowing no one even knew where he was, as he lay there feeling alone but also so desperately crowded by her absence, he didn’t know what to do. He just needed something. But he knew he’d never be able to find what that something was.