After December

Television programs, they show emotion like it is supposed to be. They show people sad and lonely, but the truth is that’s how we all behave because we’re told that’s how sorrow looks. I could go down into his bedroom and sit in his closet among all his clothes and his old skateboarding pads and helmet. I could flip through yearbooks and read notes that people had written to him when he was here among us with a future and decisions to make. I could stand on the stairwell and look at all the pictures of him growing up, remembering having a birthday party for Butterscotch, meeting Santa at the mall, and taking team photos in our Speedo bathing suits. I could do all those television and movie mourning scenes, but it wasn’t going to get me there. It was all just fake sadness, surface sadness, the kind you can share with others.

True sorrow wouldn’t find any of us, or at least not me, for a while. But on that Friday, I had no way of knowing this wasn’t the real way it was going to be, I only knew that Tony could have appreciated that I was doing my best to make it sink in.