We can’t fix it.
We can’t go back.
Even if we wanted to.
***
The hours and days continue to blur. One bleeds into the next like watercolor on wet paper.
Funeral arrangements. Quiet phone calls. Muted voices in rooms that used to echo with laughter. Picking out a coffin. A gravestone. Signing forms I don’t remember reading. And trying to figure out where I belong in all of it. If I belong at all.
Mom hasn’t left her room.
Jasper’s the only one she opens the door for. The only one she responds to. She won’t eat. Barely speaks. She lies curled up on the bed in Dad’s old flannel, staring at the wall like she’s waiting for him to walk back in.
She drinks water, but only because Jasper begs her to.
And Brooks...
Brooks stays quiet.
Distant.
He doesn’t talk about the funeral. Doesn’t talk about Dad. Doesn’t talk at all unless someone asks him a direct question.
But I know why. He’s tired of people dying.
My father wasn’t just my father. He washis, too. At least, the closest thing he had left. And now that anchor is gone. I think he’s afraid to reach for anything else. Afraid it’ll disappear, too.
So, he pulls away.
And I let him.
Because I don’t know how to grieve with him. Not like this. Not when we were tangled in bedsheets the night Dad died. Not when the weight of that timing still knots in my throat.
He sleeps on the couch.
I sleep alone.
Our hands don’t find each other in the hallway. He doesn’t reach for my waist in the kitchen. He brews coffee silently in the mornings. I thank him silently with a nod.
It feels wrong that we’re being careful with each other, when two nights ago there was nothing careful about us at all.
And that's how we live now. Quiet. Careful. Separate.
Grief lives here. In the walls, in the ceilings, and in the pauses between our words. It clings to the house like dust we can’t wipe away.
And it’s everywhere Brooks turns.
Everywhere I turn.
Then, the day of the funeral arrives.
Mom won’t come. She locks herself in the bedroom and wails. They’re loud, guttural sobs that shake the walls. Jasper tries, but he can’t reach her. Wren wraps an arm around his shoulder as my brother paces the hall like a ghost in a suit.
Brooks doesn’t say a word. He sticks to the kitchen, rigid in a black suit and tie, staring into a cup of untouched coffee.
I slip into a simple black dress with capped sleeves and leave my face bare. What’s the point of mascara when the grief’s written so clearly in my eyes?
