As if cancer cares what kind of man you are.
There were moments when my eyes landed on something small and ordinary—the coffee mug by the sink, the basket of clean towels on the counter, Pops’s favorite chair in the corner—and my stomach dropped like I’d missed a step on the stairs.
Because those things still exist.
But he doesn’t.
And that makes no sense.
My brain keeps trying to rewrite reality.
It keeps waiting for a door to open down the hall. For his voice to call out “kiddo?” in that half-tired, half-amused tone like he caught me overthinking again.
It keeps expecting a text.
A knock.
A cough.
Anything.
But grief is not a movie where the dead come back in the third act.
Grief is just…a suffocating silence where someone used to be.
I don’t cry.
Not in front of them.
Not in front of anyone.
My body has decided tears are too dangerous. Like if I start, I won’t stop, and there’s still too much to do. There are still people in my house, eating from paper plates, talking about my dad as if he’s an anecdote instead of the axis my life spun around.
So I stay upright.
I stay polite.
I keep my voice steady.
I do the thing Pops taught me without ever saying it out loud: handle it.
I don’t look at the clock because I can’t bear to see how the day keeps moving.
I don’t look at Cameron too long because if I see the way he’s holding himself together with tape and teeth, I’ll break just from watching him.
And I don’t look at Logan for more than a second at a time because Logan looks at me like he’s trying to memorize me in case I disappear too.
He stays close without touching.
Like he’s learned the shape of my boundaries in the last eleven days, and he’s respecting them the way you respect a wound.
Every so often, he asks if I need anything—water, food, air—and every time I say no, because if I need something, it means I’m human, and if I’m human, I might fall apart.
So I say no.
Because no is easy.
Because no keeps the floor under me.
