Summer is once again hot, heavy and humid. Sweat already prickles on my brow the moment I open my car door. It sweeps over me and around my shoulders like a winter coat. I wish the wind would pick up soon even if only to blow more hot air across my skin. After twenty summers spent in one place, a girl might learn that they will always burn. It didn’t occur to me till this moment that I could have visited you in the cooler hours of the morning and saved us both from the heat stroke. Too little, too late I guess.
I haven’t been to see you here, not since that first time. Mom thinks it might be good for me to come out here and spend a couple of hours with you, to see this place in a better light. I don’t have the heart or the vocabulary or frankly the emotion to tell her that idea makes me sick to my stomach. However, it made her smile when I agreed so I guess that’s worth something.
With a blanket tucked under my armpit, I make my way over to your plot. It’s the blanket mom got for each of us when we graduated high school. Mine had the blue flowers to your red stars. It always pissed you off for some reason when we had to match. You had the “boy” colors to my “girl” colors but we matched nonetheless. Before we were born, you must have taken all my anger and the way I took your sadness. You would look so furious with your furrowed brow and tense jaw while all I could conjure was teary eyes and flared nostrils. I wish you’d left me all your anger so I could cling to something brighter.
Dad texted me the fastest path to get to you when I told him I was heading over here. He’s been visiting everyday so it figures he would have several paths memorized. He likes to take his walks around here but really I think he just wants to make sure you don’t get lonely. It can’t be easy being the first to go.
I weave in and around headstones and grave markers. The swirling feeling in my stomach only builds the closer I get to you. The burning of my shoulders is a distraction and I remember the fact that I forgot sunscreen in the car. Turning back means going back to my car which will lead to me inevitably getting back into my car and driving to my apartment with the promise of doing this tomorrow. Which I did yesterday and the day before that and all the days last week.
I keep pushing my body forward even if my feet drag on the ground more than usual until I arrive at your place. Someone must be looking out for me because a cool shade from a tree covers you. It spreads its fingers wide over you, cool enough to keep a little morning dew on the grass. I’m not sure I remember it from last time but my memory has been so foggy since you left. Nothing sticks in my mind the way it used to, it just peels like paint off an abandoned wall. Your gravestone sits alone, the area around blocked out for the rest of our family. Flowers lay scattered around your grave in a halo along with laminated photos of you. I’m not sure when my tears started but I’m concerned they’ll never stop now that I’m here. They burn salt trails down my cheeks. Gently, I place the blanket over top of the grave and sit criss-cross in front of you.
Mom says that some days when she visits, she catches you watching her from a bench a couple feet past your grave. Dad says that he sees you standing at the entrance when he gets out of his car. They only ever see you from the corner of their eyes, a blur against the clarity of everything else. The moment they turn to face you, empty air greets them. Neither of them will admit that in some strange way you are haunting them. I think they are afraid that if they acknowledge that they shouldn’t be seeing you that they’ll actually stop seeing you.
Mom said that she saw you standing next to me during the funeral. She couldn’t make out the details of your face but she saw your hand on my shoulder. The thought makes me want to claw my hands through the grass and to the cold dirt below. Dig my way down until we are on the same plane of existence even if it’s not the same. I’m almost mad that you aren’t standing in the distance silently staring at me. Is this one final act as my brother, to deny me my peace? Please, come out so I can speak into the empty air without feeling like a lonely child. I’m not ready to be half of a whole.
Thirty four days, fourteen hours and 53 minutes. The seconds are hard to keep track of so I tend to ignore them. That is how much older I am than you now that you are gone. It was only ever supposed to just be one minute. One small measly minute that I held over you growing up for as many years as I could manage. It was my lifeline to being an “older” sister but I really would give anything to stop time from stepping forward. When our birthday rolls around the way it must every year, you’ll stay twenty while I age for what feels like forever. I want to walk the weeks back into days back into hours back into a single minute and tell them to never move again. I want to be the one who left first. If I got here first, shouldn’t I be the first to leave? It’s only proper I take your place.
Rylee Larson is an aspiring writer currently studying literature and creative writing at Pacific University in Oregon. Growing up in a small town in Minnesota gave her a lot of time to read and dream about seeing the rest of the world. When she’s not reading or writing, she spends lots of time surrounded by friends, family, and her amazing cats.
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