Amazing, Because It Is.

From a proud tower in the town, death looks gigantically down - Edgar Allen Poe.

I stood alone like I had always been. I stood alone like I was destined to always be - staring silently and impassively at the irately burning, full-bellied sun which now fell, dying a languorous death, beyond the horizon, the last few rays escaping; dancing across drooping petals and crusty soil in my mother’s long neglected flower garden, before they were tucked away for the night. They played across the hard planes of my features, casting sinister shadows on my face, the light catching in dark strands of my hair and reflecting off of natural highlights. I stood in my stocking feet, my uncomfortable heels dangling from two stiffly hooked fingers, my red toenail polish stark against the black of my panty-hose, feeling the startling, crisp coolness of the grass tickling my feet, inhaling deep lungfuls of its earthy scent. It was freshly trimmed - a measure of condolences from the next door neighbor with the expensive John Deer mower.

I was glad to be away. Glad to separate myself from the awkward company of sympathetic faces, all of which were etched deeply with equal lines of sadness and pity, the same disconsolate, solemn look of a kicked puppy decorating their miserable visage. I couldn’t stand their sympathy; it only made me angry, made me want to lash out at them, make them swallow their apologies, gather their black accessories - which lived in the back of their closets, purchased exactly for occasions such as this - and leave. Their grief did me no good.

Grief. The word tasted bitter as it curled like a whisper around my tongue; felt like flames lapping at my mind. My grandmother had run out to the nearest Barnes and Noble and bought me the trite, cliché book – The Five Stages of Grief. Currently, it laid crumpled obscenely, a fallen soldier, its pages torn and twisted, at the very bottom of the trashcan up in my room. It was written under the suspicion that grief was uniform, one size fits all. It was a terrible assumption. Personally, I had entirely skipped over the first stage: denial and isolation, and gone straight to anger.

Cheeks flushed and alight with much more warm-toned color than my ivory complexion could handle successfully, I'd stood over the waste-bin, which would soon become the book’s coffin, clutching another book - one lined with rows of matches.

The match I selected had snapped as I lit it, and then it sizzled as the flame took hold, and I pinched it between two cautious fingers, watching the flame as it licked closer and closer to my unmarred skin; watching it with a sick intensity, debating internally whether to drop the little flame into the can; to send the offending piece of literature up in flames. In all honesty, I was counting on the fire finally reaching my fingers; burning them. Shocked by the pain, I'd reflexively lose my hold on the match, and I'd be free from making the decision myself.

Milliseconds before I got burned, I blew out the match.

"You always were a wuss, Brooklyn. What are you so afraid of?"

Jeremy's words circled in my mind like carnivorous vultures, swooping down with large, dark wings that spanned my entire conscious and pecking at wounds that were already stinging.

And now, here I was, opening myself up to a different sort of hurt, one that threatened to cave my chest in if I let it.

I wondered fleetingly what had I been thinking, coming to stand in our backyard.

I realized then how disillusioned I was, thinking that maybe, just maybe, Jeremy would spring out from behind our favorite childhood oak tree, its trunk knotted with happy memories, and swoop me up into his deeply muscled arms, shouting vague, helter-skelter things about pirates and unicorns?

It wasn't going to happen, and somewhere deep down, I knew it.

Because here were the facts:

Jeremy was gone. Gone forever. My older brother would not return from some obscure hiding place to play ninja pirates with me like we had when I was five. Not to mention, I was clearly not progressing normally through the stages of grief, and if I couldn’t conquer the beginning or the middle, would there be any end?

Did that make me crazy, or did the fact that I hadn't yet allowed myself time to cry?

Either way, I was crazy, and Jeremy was dead.