Silence....
We were staring at each other as the deafening sound of silence grew louder with every breath I took. The silence gnawed at my insides, it hung in the air like the suspended moment before a falling glass shatters on the ground. The silence was like a gaping void, needing to be filled with sounds, words, anything. The silence was poisonous in it's nothingness, cruelly underscoring how loud our argument had become. The silence was eerily unnatural, like a dawn devoid of birdsong, it clung to the air like a puff of cigarette smoke. Silence seeped into our every pore, a poison slowly paralyzing us from either speech or movement.
Nothing’s Okay.
For as long as I can remember he's been struggling, he's been limping, he's been hurting. My sisters never saw it, they were too young, too naive. But I? I saw it. Everyday I saw how the guilt bit at him, how he faked a smile, how he put on a brave face for the rest of us because that's who my uncle was. He was brave, he was strong, and he was loving. The uncle that I had was always more than enough for me, but was he enough for himself? I can't get inside his head, I can't tell you what he was thinking, but I can tell you that I loved my uncle very much.
I was eight when he got in his accident, when he crashed into another car and left two kids without a mom. I remember that night like it was yesterday: my mom got a call from my grandma, she began packing bags as tears streamed down her face like a river, and in a blink of an eye she was out of the house and on her way to Santa Cruz. I'm sixteen now, you'd think that by now everything would be okay and what happened that night would be buried in the past, but this isn't that kind of story.