On grief

I tend not, really, to think back to that day when I made plasticine figures for people that I didn't know, in an attempt to turn irretrievable darkness into a smile or a lingering acknowledgment.

I was 3 and had successfully evaded the boy at number 7 who on our horseshoe-shaped road, had threatened to eat me alive as I got lost on my way home.

I was 3 and I had bold plans. I was 3 and nothing could touch me.

And so death, when it came, wreaked such damage that it dismantled all of our lives for a while. Scattered us to the wind. Fighting our way through the customs, we were noticeably smaller, diminished, as if the parts of us we hadn't checked in had been dispersed and remained skulking in a lost-luggage office, unclaimed.

I don't recall much about the subsequent year, apart from the insurmountable sorrow that I did not understand and the memories of that one night and early wintery morning. And of the Doctor whose name I forget now and who ordinarily was awful but on that day, was as sweet as grief would allow.

I remember him of course. Fleetingly, and in daydreams I remember him better. I remember angels wearing denim who endeavoured to shoot the breeze. Ruminating over the time and the hour and the vagaries of life. I remember those who spoke to me gently and firmly, later, of my imagination.

But when I think of him I remember wings against the window, plasticine figures. And I see him around corners, in places I'd forgotten I knew, smiling in puddles and larking elated, witnessing the wind. I remember another brother, older and bolder. One who drummed, a magician conducting the melody and who scratched out his teenaged will on a wall in spray paint, when he was just a boy. Who spoke in a such a way that life won't ever quite deliver all that it promises to offer.

The gap they leave aches persistent; a dull tooth that I shall never get around to checking for fear of losing them to a filling.

I remember those that I lost too soon, but sometimes I cannot place them. They remain drifting a little left of the horizon, lingering and dictating my living hours, when I ought to be dancing more, fearing less and shrugging off the inevitable. Putting hours to bed.

But at night when sleep should hold and claim me without thinking, I dream mostly of falling teeth and wake to a morning little changed, despite my years.