Member-only story
A Space The Size Of Violence
A letter to the man I could have loved.
*TW: Suicide
Dear T:
Is it possible to mourn for someone you didn’t really know?
Other than chatting in the few classes we shared in high school and then reconnecting half a decade later over Tinder, I can’t claim to know much about your life at all.
What I can say is that I remember your warm smile, your quiet kindness, and the ghosts you carried in the set of your jaw, the tightness of your shoulders, and under the hollows of your eyes.
And now that you are gone, all I can see are the indents and spaces you have left behind. The perpetual yearning and loss that have opened up in your absence, the void that can never be paved over.
Lips are cracked open as easily as eggshells that spit out questions and pleas like a double yolk. Memories are exhumed and excavated for just one more story, one more minute of togetherness with you.
We all become private investigators, trying belatedly to find and piece together the clues you must have left behind. The ones that could have led us to save you, if only we were better listeners.
Goodbyes and RIPs are etched into the remnants of your social media, which is only a crude simulation of…
