ten years

It's been ten years since everything changed.

He'd be twenty-seven now, and I can't imagine him like that. He's frozen in my memory, the no-longer-so-awkward teenager, grown into his limbs and confidence. Head brimming with ideas, plans, recipes for smoke bombs and schematics for motorbikes. I was fifteen to his seventeen and I still thought we were all invincible.

I sometimes go weeks now without thinking about him. When I do, again, it's with a vague sense of shame for having forgotten at all. How can life still be going on, when on this day a decade ago my family quietly melted into the hole he was leaving?

I'm at work now, awake through the night, reliving that night as my patients sleep quietly, safe in their beds. We drove through the dark to Toronto, dozing off only to be shaken alert over and over and over again by the realization that nothing was ever going to be the same. We arrived to the hospital with the morning, and my first impulse was to laugh. To tell the nurses that they were crazy because that boy in that bed couldn't possibly be my cousin. Because I'd never seen him so still before.

But it was him. The telltale scars on his head shone white through his short hair, testament to a life lived recklessly. Joyfully. And he was still. And so we knew that it was him and that it wasn't him and nothing made sense.

The next days were a blur, but I have one incredibly distinct memory. The room was quiet. Sunlight flooded through an uncurtained window and a nurse moved quietly around his bed. Her touch was gentle as she put vaseline on his lips and lotion on his hands. It's a sunny day, Johnny, she told him, even though she knew he was past hearing. Everyone's here to see you. They're all here. Her way, I've later come to realize, of letting him know that it was okay to go.

And so he went. And we were left trying to find our way in a world that suddenly wasn't our own because he wasn't in it. It's been ten years, and sometimes I think I'm still lost without him.