I was going through your things today, the first time since the accident, when something fell out of your jacket pocket. It was a small trinket, not much of anything, an amber bead with a tiny ant trapped inside. I remember you finding it like you found so many other things, as if it were lying there waiting for you to pick it up and treasure it like it was meant to be. You saw the true worth in so many pieces of discarded treasure, each of your little findings so perfect in their flaws. I picked up the bead and thought of your smile, full and open in that curious way you have about you. No one smiles like you do. I miss it, your smile. I put the bead back in your pocket, because I know that you’ll notice if I move it and freak out trying to search the whole house to find it again. As I placed the jacket back on the pile of dirty clothes where I found it, your room spun about me and I sunk to the floor. Your clothes smell of you, that rich earthy smell that I use to scold you for. I can’t scold you now, the nurses keep you so clean and undisturbed while you sleep. That is so unlike who you are. I hope you are dreaming, the doctors say you’re not, but that can’t be so. You are a dreamer. My little boy of a dreamer, sleeping his boyhood away without dreams. I wish I could cry. I have not cried since the accident, my shrink finds it all so perplexing, but how could I cry over that boy that’s not you on that bed that’s not yours in that room faraway. You should be smiling, should be laughing, be dreaming but you’re not. How could I cry, when I feel so unmoved by a shell of a boy that’s not mine? I miss you, now more than ever in the places you were but no longer can be, but there is little I can do except miss you. Am I any better than that little ant, trapped inside this semi-opaque world clouded over with your absents? For me, my days don’t come one after the next like they should. They stopped the day they told me about the accident and they will not start again until you wake.