The truth is nothing can ever describe this feeling, and it really never goes away. You can sit alone or even in a crowd of students, you can sit in silence or watch a movie, or listen to a lecture. Nothing ever helps and it never leaves your mind fully. At first you wake up in the morning and the sounds around you play games with you, you think, for just a minute, that it was all just a dream and that the running water of the kitchen sink downstairs is really him cleaning dishes or about to make himself a pot of coffee or the familiar tapping of the computer keyboard in the other room is him playing a video game like he always used to do. So you’ll walk down the stairs and each step you take makes you think “what if it wasn’t just a dream” and then you stop, even before you hit the last step and you take a deep breath and try to make yourself move, but then the flashes hit you, the memories, busting through the garage door to find him on the ground, his body still, the blood splatter that managed to get on his face. You rushing over only to find blood oozing from the hole in his chest everywhere, even all over his neck, the puddle starting to build on the floor and his wide eyes staring up at the ceiling and his mouth hanging open, the tears rolling down your face and by the time your even half way through the memory tears roll down your face again, or just sometimes your body starts to shake like you’re cold and you get goose bumps but in truth you’re not even cold, you’re just afraid, in shock, and just sometimes you cried so much before that this time you don’t even have anymore tears to cry anymore but your face still feels like it broke out in a sweat and you stop breathing for just a moment. Then you remember the one thing you could only manage to say when you sat next to him on the ground “daddy” not “dad” not “Ken”, just “daddy” like you’re three again, and you felt just as helpless as a three year old, but the second you said that word, he starts gasping for air and you get a ringing in your ears, not really sure if it’s from the shock and the fact you can hardly breathe and your heart is racing so fast you could just easily pass out but you don’t let yourself, or if it’s from all the sirens getting closer and closer, but the second he moves and keeps gasping for air you try to talk to him, but have absolutely no idea what to say, so you just start pleading, begging him not to go, not to leave you, that you need him, that he’s the only person in the world you can talk to, that he’s your best friend and he can’t go, but just by the look on his face, the fact that his eyes stayed wide and weren’t moving, you know it was beyond too late to change the way it was going to happen, the way he was going to go, so you just cry and tell him you’re not mad and that you love him, that you’re not mad that he has to go, and you remember how you placed your hand on his arm and how cold it felt and you just try to comfort him while your sister puts presser on the wound but in moments he lets out a long breath and someone pulls you back, dragging you out of the garage and cops are yelling at you but you can’t hear anything but the ringing in your ears, you don’t look at anything as they drag you outside besides your dad laying there and the cop trying to pull your sister off of him before they pull you into the night.
In the same second you fade back into your morning and whip your eyes clean of tears and you finish that long moment and reach the bottom of the stairs and look around, sometimes only to find no one, not even at the computer when you could have sworn you heard someone there, but every time… it’s not him, not anymore and never again.
That lump in your throat, you carry it all day, every day. It never seems to go away, it stops you from eating, from thinking, sometimes even from breathing. That lump… before you go to sleep, if you can manage to sleep that night, only gets bigger and it pushes every tear you held back that day out, every single one, even ones that can’t even form anymore, to were your sobs are dry and painful.
Each day does grow different, but only because the world never stops moving, but one thing always stays the same from that day on, that he’s not there anymore and that he never will be. That each memory of your past, each accomplishment you’ve ever made, and every birthday you’ve ever had, he was there. Now each morning you wake up and do something, accomplish something, grow or change in any way… he won’t be there anymore… and you know that you haven’t even hardly started to make memories yet… that one day you’re going to graduate… you’re going to go to college… get married… and have babies… and he won’t get to be there for any of that. That there’s still so many first’s to be had… and he’s gone. That the one person you knew would always be there for you when you fell… is gone. That you haven’t even started to live yet… and he died. That like him… you’ve lost something that can never be replaced.
