A True Story with a Little Projection
(written in 2019 on my old blog, 3 years after Sam died)
He’s following his big sister down the sidewalk, fumbling with the handful of Legos that are too big for his little hands. 'Wait for me,' he says. Or did he think it? Can she even hear him? She is only a few steps ahead of him but it feels like he is galaxies away. When she thought of her youngest brother she thought about Legos. Piles of them. Buckets of them. Landscapes of them crunching underneath her bare feet at the lake house. He’s trying to keep pace with her but he’s struggling to hold onto the plastic pieces of their childhood that she always associated with her memories of him. One of the blocks slipped through his fingers and if he stopped to pick it up, he wouldn’t have been able to keep up with her. So he left it there on the sidewalk and decided he’d pick it up on their way back.
I was walking home from class with my headphones in, thinking about Sam. When I die, I wondered, which version of me will people remember the most vividly? Maybe my childhood friends will remember my blonde bangs and high pitched voice. Maybe my high school classmates will remember my thick eyeliner and that brownish-black hair color that my natural roots never quite took to… and my violin and my paints and my bedroom walls decoupaged in pages torn from encyclopedias and how I always seemed to be on crutches. I like to think my siblings would remember my laugh. I associate the word happiness with my family when we’re laughing the kind of laughter that temporarily freezes time; the kind of laughter that fills the corners of your eyes with tears. When I hear Sam’s name I think about us as kids, playing in the sand. Laughing. I used to think stepping on Legos barefoot was the most painful feeling imaginable but now when I'm missing Sam, I know I was wrong.
Despite a consistent sensation of loneliness, I haven’t felt truly alone since God began plucking people from my life. I feel them all around me, all the time now. I was walking home from class alone but I didn’t feel alone. It felt like I was being followed. This was probably five months after Sam died and my mind was wandering when it found him; he was ten years old again fumbling with those fucking Legos. And suddenly, on a walk in the middle of campus, I was thirteen again, stopped dead in my tracks looking at a real-life Lego on the sidewalk. It was a black, four-by-two block. I picked it up and looked around wondering if I was the only one seeing it. My head muted everything around me and tears started pooling in the corner of my eyes the way they did when I used to laugh. Right then, I had to laugh or else I'd cry.
And although the little boy wasn't ever able to catch up to his sister, he watched her pick up his Lego on their way back from class and they laughed again. The kind of laughter that freezes time; the kind of laughter that fills the corners of your eyes with tears.
And he knew she knew he was there.
