Gone

He left a note.

Mom read it but her hands were shaking, shaking and she was crying, big wet tears that trailed down her face and ruined her makeup and dropped onto the paper and smudged the words. His words. His words that, like everything, were hurried and messy and impersonal and touched down gently into the base of our hearts and then lifted off again as though he had never been there at all. He wrote formally and addressed the situation like an adult, which seemed strange to me because he had never acted like an adult before. Mom would later come to describe it as distant and say that, for months leading up to it, he had been just that, though he hadn’t. He had just been him, because he had always been sort of disconnected and unorganized, though maybe that was it. Maybe his personality should have been a sign from the very beginning, a warning sign or something that we should have taken and pulled and made sure that he was alright. But how could we have known?

They say that it’s no one’s fault, but I know that they secretly think it’s ours. Beneath all of their apologies and sad, teary smiles they whisper and accuse, pointing fingers that everyone knows are there but no one acknowledges. Yeah, beneath all of their casseroles and black clothes and money donated to pay for it all, they all think that we’re the culprits—not him. Never him. We tore his life apart by being completely unaware of the thoughts that were raging inside of his head and all of the things that he kept hidden from us were all our fault, too. All the things that we never knew about could have been known, they say, quietly and angrily with voices that tear into our silence and rip away at the seams we’ve started to sew back together.

Our hands shake and the stitches are unsteady.

The seams spell out the words how, could, we, have and, in the back of my mind, I worry whether or not things will ever be the same.

They won’t.