Sometimes, I find you still smell like him.
It\'s only when I miss
my brother
the most that you do.
And after summer died, I would close his old door to preserve the
remains of boyish cologne, but always turn around and find it
open again.
Over and over, I would close the door, and over and over, it swung
open again, like an old cut that wouldn\'t heal.
In the dead of night when the cut was bleeding
too profoundly, I crept inside his room. It had been months.
The cologne still lingered. That was the day I took you,
old blanket,
to my room.
I say I keep you there to let go. But I think I keep you there to
hold on.
There are days when I see his face in the
strangest of places. In places he would never go. Places he stood
too tall
to fit into. When I\'d turn around to see if he was still there, he never was.
That is how it always went.
And
There are places that the mind doesn\'t reach. Truths to terrible to name. Demons that emerge
when one is alone with their secret pain. They make you scream. They make you
understand that you will never be anything to him. They make you
laugh that his legacy will be a
blanket
that he used before he flew across the country, and, by choice,
screwed with the ideology of breaking a
little sister\'s heart. In the back of my heart, there\'s a
list.
Of the times I tried to email him.
Times I tried to call. Say hello. Say goodbye. To pretend that two weeks a year are
enough to have him. To burn you, ugly and rotting blanket.
To burn my list. But the list keeps growing and growing and
growing until it inevitably flows out of my mouth and chokes me and
crawls into my eyes, catching fire to the tear ducts that
cried for nights and weeks to get over his
metaphorical and putrid
death.
Until finally,
I am
eaten alive by the flames.
That is what I want. The tears always extinguish
the fire, though. The years remain prominent in
the ashes. The cut is always
cauterized.
And you, ugly and rotting blanket,
Never burn.