Sometimes i just like to remember things. and sometimes i don't.

---

And there's that knock on the door. The one we never want to hear. The conversation we never want to have.

Dead.

And my throat doesn't just close, it constricts. I swear cartilage cracks as I keep the keening inside. Solemn eyes and heavy hands turn their faces and weep openly.

But I can't do it. I'm supposed to cry, I know this. But my eyes are dry and blinking is beyond me. She's gone, and tomorrow I'm going to England.

So it goes.

So it goes. This is life I tell myself, death is life. It's okay to cry, to rage, to be angry and sorrowful at the same time. But all I can do is pack my bag as my mother weeps and asks me if I want her to wait until I get back to have the funeral.

I shake my head.

I do not mourn.

Two weeks in England and I never tell him that the woman who gave him chocolate and a Hallmark card is gone. He smiles, I smile and I promise no one can tell the difference.

It's easy to be happy. Being sad is so hard. My parents, I think, assume I mourned on the trip. Maybe they imagine me sitting in the airplane's bathroom sobbing and wiping my cheeks with toilet paper that feels like oak bark.

I never shed a tear.

I did not whimper, nor wail nor sob or even cry. I told one person and they told me they were sorry and promptly forgot about it. I didn't tell him, I still haven't and it's been almost three years. I hate sympathy and I didn't want it from him or his family.

I shed no tears.

I did not mourn.

And in truth, I never felt that I needed to, and so I never did. Even reading the last note she ever gave me which came with a journal to record my travels in England (which I did not do) brought out no tears. No repressed anger or sadness; just a sense of nostalgia and my pack-rat urge to hang on to it, one day it may be important. I wondered if secretly I was a robot. I felt as if I had never learned how to cry.

I decided that I never would.

I always knew that I would die young.