Joyceline

I lost somebody I love to suicide.

It happened in March. I still feel like it hasn’t made that complete transition into reality yet. It becomes a little bit more real every time I wake up, and every time I cry.

He died. I can’t believe he died. I still have a hard time thinking about it, much less, saying it out loud. He died. Kenneth died.

I lost my grandmother to diabetes several years ago, but life is cruel, and it turned this into a new kind of pain. She was an elderly woman. She suffered from a long-term illness. He killed himself. He shot himself in his bedroom. He was 25 years old. He died. How do you come to terms with something like that? It’s like suddenly waking up without your right arm.

I didn’t go to the funeral. I couldn’t. I was 430-something miles away in a psychiatric ward, hysterical with grief and confusion and horror. Oh, my God.

I remember telling myself once, if he killed himself, then I would kill myself. If he really was somewhere else (whatever “somewhere else” means), I would see him again.

I would press my face against his shoulder, and ball fists around his shirt collar, and love him, and scream at him, and comfort him, and cry with him, and demand truths, and collide with him in my own madness.

I wanted to be where he was, even if it was nowhere.

I’ll never have closure. Never. But maybe I don’t even want closure. The last time I saw him, he was alive. He was so alive. He was looking into my eyes, and he was 25 years old, and beautiful, and he was walking, and talking, and breathing. His voice was soft and placid, gently cutting through the cold air we quietly stood in.

I want to keep remembering him this way. I want to remember him vividly and wildly. I want him emblazoned in my memory like crisp, perfect photographs.

I miss you. Oh, my God, I miss you.