I slept through my alarm this morning. When I woke up almost an hour after I was supposed to, I leapt out of bed and took a two minute shower, just barely enough time to wash my hair. Then I threw on the clothes I’d prepared days before, and then, right before I left, I looked in the mirror. I looked perfect: morose, somber, sorrowful. Wracked with grief. Maybe I was, I wasn’t too sure. I figured I probably should’ve been… it’s not every day someone close to you dies.

The subway ride to the church seemed quicker than it was. When I got off, people looked and I could hear their thoughts as if they were walking beside me to whisper in my ear. Goin’ to a funeral? So sorry, young lady. Who was it? Your father, your mother? Sibling? A friend, you say? Poor darling. I wanted to tell them to stop. I would find plenty of sympathy to crawl into at the funeral.

Sympathy. I like to think of it as a little den. A cool, damp little rabbit’s hole, dug somewhere in the forest. This little place is a home to something, and thus it is comforting. It fits so many little tiny baby bunnies and full adult bunnies, houses more than anything the company of others, sharing of space. Sympathy is comfort in the arms of those who think they understand you. I don’t think anyone can understand you unless they are you… but it’s nice to think that someone does know anything about you. You’re always sharing sympathy with someone. You’re always sharing your god damned little rabbit hole with some other sorry-ass bastard… and sometimes it’s just the fucking thing you want most.

When I arrived, I was actually on time, which very much surprised me. I avoided talking as much as possible, though. I exchanged words with his parents, two glassy-eyed, middle aged people talking around the lumps forming in their throats. Talking to them made one appear in my own, and I took a back pew so no one could see me cry as the priest, the father of his community, talked about him.

Pews are uncomfortable. They’re hard and cold, polished little boxes with cubbyholes for Bibles. I hate them, and I hate how I had to sit on them and sob, because they do not have arms to warm me or tell me something nice. They’re just inanimate objects. I couldn’t find solace there. Not in religion, not in my soul, not then. There was nothing in that moment, just a vast emptiness filled with sorrow. I stopped paying attention to the priest, because I was wandering down the aisle to the casket. Even though it was closed, I could see him, his closed sleeping face, beneath the wood. My spirit reached out to touch it. Physically I was still sitting in my seat, but in my imagination, that smooth coffin was like playing with skipping stones: perfect and round.

Then the ceremony was over, and we all met the hearse at Havenwood Cemetary, a large, pretty place on a hill colored a dismal, overcast gray, thanks to the lovely weather above. How cliché, rain during a funeral. Entirely too fitting and at the same, something so expected that all meaning was lost. It started as a drizzle and then became a torrent. It was a monsoon of heavenly rain filling our souls with water and ice. We hiked through the cemetery to the fresh grave beneath a towering old oak, like the one we used to sit in after school, the two of us. I gazed at the naked branches and wondered if that oak still stood, tall and proud. It had been so long, and now that he was gone, well, I figured paying that oak a visit would do me some good.

The burial went smoothly, and each person stood by the coffin for as long as they needed, until it was me and his family. They went off a little further away to pay respects to other dead family members, and I was then alone, except for his little brother, who stood by my side and had said not a word to me or anyone. His face, round and innocent, had grown in years since I last saw him, brow furrowed and jaw set. His hand reached out to touch the wood, but mid-way out stopped and hovered. Then he lowered it and instead reached for my hand, taking it and holding tight.

I looked into the sky and saw the rain clouds, like black holes in the sky. Holes through which I felt I could ascend without effort if I wasn’t holding this child’s hand. He looked up too, and together in the sky we watched the hole suck up leaves and ants and lives. It was like looking into space through a tear in the expanse above us. I imagined shooting stars and angel wings.

He began to cry and I knelt down into the mud, dirtying my skirt to hug him. It was then I cried, because we were together in this rabbit hole, and my comfort was so cold and wet. I hugged him until his parents came to collect him. I hugged them too, and though the rain made everything glistening and cleanly wet, their eyes were red and glassy.

And so I was alone, with his coffin. They would come to lower it soon, and I didn’t want to watch it, so I left. I rode the subway back home in my wet, dirty funeral outfit and when I got home, I took a shower and crawled into bed, but couldn’t find the warmth I sought. Instead I kept my eyes on the window and watched the street outside, all those busy lives continuing one after another. How many would die tomorrow, or the next day? Were they dead already? How could they live knowing that around them there is sorrow around every corner? There was nothing to hold me in that bed, no one to cry into or call. There were no blankets to snuggle into or arms to be enveloped in, so I watched the people outside for hours and wished for it all to change, for time to go back and to stop it all before this.

The rain continued.