somewhere for the noise to go
A year.
a lot of time goes by in a year. i am posting this so anyone who is looking for me can stop looking. my uncles death hit harder then i thought it would so i went off the grid for a while. i am sorry for not saying anything sooner but i am perfectly fine
nobody needs to look for me. i am not missing. i am right where i am supposed to be and i will be okay
My study group bailed at the last minute. All four of them, within ten minutes of each other, like they'd agreed on it somewhere I couldn't see. I barely knew them anyway.
Nobody is on the floor tonight either. Half of them finished their exams and went home, and the other half are somewhere louder than here. I walked the hallway at nine and every door was dark. The whole building has gone quiet.
Honestly, I almost welcome it. Just me, the orange light, and a whole semester to cram into one night. No distractions.
I just reached into my backpack for my binder, and my fingers found leather instead. I'd forgotten it was in there. Genuinely, completely forgotten - which is strange, because it feels like it's been waiting for exactly this. An empty room. Nobody around.
I'll deal with it after I study.
Wish me luck.
I've never liked funerals. There's a weight to the air around the dead, like the room is still holding the shape of everything they were. Standing over a casket, I always think about how much one person carries - every memory, every bad night, every small stupid joy - and how all of it just stops.
I wish I could say I felt that for Uncle Victor. I didn't.
I expected to be alone at the graveside. He'd made sure of that. But halfway through, I realized someone was standing a few yards away. An old woman, her face so lined it looked carved. I couldn't tell if she was mourning or gloating.
When it was over, she told me he was a good man.
I lost it. I'm not proud of what I said. Something about him being a miserable, paranoid bastard who died exactly the way he lived. She didn't flinch. She laughed - a dry, papery sound - and said things about protection, and bloodlines, and how I owed him more than I knew.
Then she slapped me. Hard enough to put me on my knees in the wet grass. While my ears were ringing, she muttered something about stubbornness, and about my father, and pushed a book into my hands.
When I looked up, she was gone. No footsteps. No car pulling away. A flat, open cemetery, and nobody in it but me.
The book is a journal, so old the leather has gone soft and cracked. It smells like a basement and a fistful of pennies. There are markings on the cover that make my eyes ache if I look at them too long.
I worked the clasp open long enough to feel the pages, thin as moth wings, and then I shoved it in my backpack. I haven't read it.
He died last night.
The hospital called at six this morning. I'm listed as next of kin. I'm the only kin there is.
So the funeral falls to me. I spent the day on the phone with a funeral director whose voice was so soft it felt like being wrapped in cotton. The cost is obscene. I can't bring myself to resent it, though. Somebody has to put him in the ground, and there's nobody left but me.
Here's the ugly truth, since nobody reads this: I'm not sad. I keep reaching for grief and closing my hand on something else. Something that feels a lot like relief. He spent his last years turning into something I didn't recognize - paranoid, bitter, rotting in plain sight - and I think part of me said goodbye to him a long time ago.
I don't like what that says about me.
I got a call on Thursday from a hospital two hours north. Uncle Victor is dying. They found my number on a scrap of paper in his wallet, which surprised me more than the news did. I didn't think he'd keep anything.
I drove up this morning.
I remember him differently from the man in that bed. When I was a kid, his visits were an event. Coin tricks. Quarters pulled from behind my ear. Presents wrapped in newspaper that never quite made sense. Then somewhere along the way, the strangeness that used to make him fun curdled into something else. He stopped visiting. He stopped calling. He drew his curtains and stayed behind them, and the rest of the family let him, until there wasn't a rest of the family left to let him do anything.
Now he's a shape under a hospital blanket. His skin is stretched over his bones like wet paper over a frame. Every breath sounds like dry leaves dragged across concrete.
When I leaned in, he grabbed my wrist. I've never felt a grip like that, not from a man who looked like he couldn't lift a spoon. His eyes were burning. He told me someone was coming for me. That I was the last of his blood. That after he died, a messenger would come.
The nurse said that kind of confusion is normal near the end.
I nodded and thanked her and didn't tell her what I was really thinking about, which was the tattoo on his forearm. A dark, twisting vine. I've seen it my whole life and never once asked about it. Today it reached past his elbow. I could swear it used to stop at the wrist.