Remembering

I wrote this on a bad day a while back. I've been thinking about it and figured it would be appropriate to share. I don't typically do poetry, it's just how it came out. And they're my perceptions, my feelings, even if it's a 'we' pronoun. 



It's been almost a year since my brother ended his life. 
Twelve terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad months. 
Not terrible every moment of every day; 
but it's always there, 
the elephant in the room, 
the empty spot on the couch,
the thing we only talk about sometimes because it hurts. 

With others we talk about it casually, 
pretending that if we are casual,
it won't be so shocking, 
it won't be so foreign (still), 
it won't hurt so much. 
But it does.

We call on the 1st day of the months (the day it happened),
wondering how everyone is doing,
sometimes not even mentioning his name. 
But we lie. 
We all lie. 

And with each other, 
we speak of it in hushed tones. 
Attempting to soften the raw edges with our soft voices. 
And failing.

We try to get together. 
We hold the baby boy he never will. 
We tell his daughters stories about when their daddy was young, 
trying to infuse our memories of a man they may not remember.
And we cry. 

We cry together and alone.
We cry in our beds and on our knees.
We cry in the car, 
yelling at the world for the injustice.

Most of us cry in church. 
We hold hands when we're together, 
hymnals blurring through our teary eyes. 
Our voices silent.

And we try to move on. 
Right-foot, left-foot, right-foot, left-foot.
We go to work, start college, move across the country for graduate school,
We have babies, go on business trips, go to summer camp. 
We try to live again.
And we do better for a while.

Then comes the remembering.
And it ruins everything.