Today, I learned how to cling for life to a drowning person.  To a whole group of drowning people, really, that moved in one great herd.  It makes sense, perhaps, to consider that as you lose that slick balance in the ocean, as your feet slip from that thin platform that was shaky-at-best in the first place, you reach out for someone not to be saved, but to know at least that they feel the same way.  That you may look in their eyes and see yourself reflected.  We are all off the same boat, all huddled in one place with our fingers wrung together in knots as the water fills us up, up, up.

The first thing is to bring food.  Pizza, water, granola bars, rolled out on carts and pushed at us.  Here, they say.  This will help.  I feel nauseas and say no.  Within hours the almighty mothers arrive, bearing trays of cookies and cookies and cookies like frankincense in their arms.  I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so so sorry.  It’s not your fault, you know.  When I do not eat, people worry.  There is much more to worry about, and yet, really nothing at all.  The worrying time is over.  I do not know what time we are in now (to grieve has always been an understatement).

I saw boys sob today.  I have not seen boys sob.

I do the math in my head.  He was fourteen.  I am seventeen.  Fourteen is a small number for such a tall boy.  Perhaps his years had fled with his breath and taken refuge in my own memory, because in the moments that I pressed my bird-body into the strangers whose names I did not know, I felt old.  Thirty-one?  Maybe.  

In the cafeteria, I feel On Stage, as we had been pulled from the back to make an example of our grief (which is a small word).  To teach.  What is there to learn from this?  My teacher said that the hardest part is accepting that we will never find a reason.  I’d say that’s about right.

There is a sense of get-it-over, that perhaps if I can squeeze the ends of my tears out of my eye-pits and wring all those cold sad-noises from my lungs, tomorrow will be brighter.  Tomorrow will be not so bad.

His girlfriend is who I see first.  She is a small girl, knees and elbows and angles (like him—he never did grow into those long arms, those long legs), and her body shakes like seizures.  What am I supposed to say to her?  Seventeen is a small number.  Fourteen is smaller.

He has become a past tense person.  He was, he lived, he cared, he smiled, he hugged.  Actions completed, past, none pregnant with the possibility of repeat.  Finality has always scared me.  Future tense?  He will live on in our hearts.  Present tense?  No.  Wait, one.  Location, location, location.  He is in heaven.  I asked a girl if he was there by now.  It’s been a little over twelve hours.  Has he reached it yet?

Once you are absent from the body, you are present with God.  Something like that.  So that meant, he was up there now?  Yes.  Heaven works fast, apparently.  I thought about it for a while, whether his soul was one moment slipping out and then the next flown to somewhere new, dragged out through the bottoms of his feet that were always too big.  He had just bought these new Converse shoes with British flags on the sides, and the patriotic reds and blues made his feet even longer.

Action is such a small word, but it’s what everyone wants.  People mill in a molasses-panic, tissues burned to their eyes with free hands flapping like birds for each other.  They want to raise money for the family, they want to hold a benefit concert and sell wristbands and sign posters and call parents.  I am instead in the group of us that have hunkered down for the long and colder winter, heads tucked into our chests and crossed arms.  I am so weary.  When I go to the bathroom, I don’t recognize myself and instead recognize Thirty-One Year Old Me in the eyes that are pulled down and sagging and bleached red.  I have wrinkles like trails pushing out of the crooks of my eyes.  How do I have wrinkles?  I am a small number.

He was my brother’s age.  Past-tense boy.  My brother is quiet today.  He is always quiet, and when I ask how he is doing, he says I’m okay and I wonder if he believes it.  I have never seen him cry, and it seems that he won’t start today.  He eats his lunch without talking, and I sit across from him without talking, feeling extraneous because I am.  We have never been close, but there is time for that.  There is always time.

A few days pass and I cannot tell whether they are short or long.  We go to his house with candles one night and huddle together in the street like penguins.  There is a boy somewhere who is fourteen and a small number reading a bible and I move to him, because when Things happen, that’s what we do.  We stand in a circle and his parents are there and his dad is in a wheelchair, which is really a small thing but a big word.  They thank us over and over and tell stories so that for moments we may laugh and remember and have that boy tucked in our warm circle of hands and candles.

As we return to the car, my brother walks in front of me and neither of us speak, and I watch as his hand reaches up, swathed in the folds of his hoodie, and touches to his eyes four times and I feel my heart aching at the number and the dark damp spot that soaks up grief.


          R.I.P. Martin Walworth—You live on in our hearts.