Toronto & The Birds

My family and I visited an amusement park in Toronto at the end of July this year. 

On the last vacation we would take together, the ride whipped us left and right and upside down. I held Elliot’s hand. I looked over at him laughing as we sped toward a pristine sky, his mouth wide. His saliva was a spiderweb in the air; when I opened my mouth to laugh, too, my saliva was a halo. We laughed harder at this. I squeezed his hand. 

The ride finally stopped and my brother’s hair stood like a mountain range. 

A month later–in the same sky– I noticed a flock of birds flying in a V. The rabbi had come to my house to help arrange Elliot’s funeral. And though I remember little about this conversation, and the days before and after it, I recall wishing that this flock could mean something to me. 

Without trying to, I see my brother everywhere. In the kitchen I see my slim brother and his sheepish, silver-dollar smile. My slim brother, sitting over six plates: shrimp, carrots and celery, eggs, yogurt, last night’s chicken, some soup. At the corner of the island in that tall orange chair, his dangling legs like icicles. 

His room is untouched, except for a few since-gifted finance books, his dinosaur slippers my mom wears, and the letter I had written to him a few days prior. His dirty clothing has been put away. I hear his shower run and, before realizing it’s my dad in there, I remember Elliot and me knocking on our bathrooms’ shared wall. I remember him sitting on his toilet seat so I could pluck his eyebrows. 

In the refrigerator I find foods that have somehow outlived him--dijon mustard, sundried tomatoes, soy sauce. We took long to throw away his Chinese leftovers, and longer for his ice cream sandwiches. 

When my dad tells me to wash my car, I can only think of Elliot offering to teach me how. I already knew (or at least well enough), but this moved me. That my little brother would teach me a skill made me proud. When I drive his blue truck I see him leaning back in the seat. He recently told me how comically large he found the steering wheel, and that he liked how the car drove--the feeling under his feet. 

I lose him hundreds of times each day. 

At her birthday lunch in early January, my grandma showed me three ceramic birds gifted to her. They stood in a line. I remembered the skybound flock in a V, and how I’d read somewhere that birds take this formation to go further with less effort. 

The flying is hard. The living, the every day, the constant losing is effortful. The missing, and the accepting that it is selfish of me to prefer the difficulty of the days with him to the anguish of the days without. The holding of pain for him with the pain for me, for the rest of us. The wanting to remember everything, but the hurting when I do. The paradox overflow.