You wore a size 8 shoe.
I know that because tonight after coming home from a late run to the store, I opened that bottom drawer of the dresser. That drawer that holds a few of your things. The drawer typically beckons to me, begging me to open it and feel it. I'm sorry that I don't do it very often, but it hurts too much. Am I afraid of the pain? For certain, I am. But maybe not so much of the pain, but what will happen if I allow it to take hold of me. Sometimes, I let it. Tonight I let it, but I couldn't do it for long.
It washes over me like hot acid and rips me to pieces. Four years, and I'm forgetting things about you. Do you know I'm crying as I write this? Do you see me? Do you still exist in any corner of the universe? People say that time heals, but that's a lie. Time is nothing but a deceitful bitch who wants me to think she's helping, but really, she does nothing but prolong the misery. Tonight I held your little shoes in my hands, the brown sandals you wore to Texas, the last pair of shoes I'd ever buy you, and the strangest thing happened. I usually feel like I'm trapped between two dimensions, and tonight was no different.
I held your little sandals and I wept, but it was like I was looking at myself in third-person. I thought to myself, how queer that the saddest and worst and most horrific thing that can happen to a person, happened to me. Wow. This is heavy. This is weird. How am I still breathing? That heart that keeps me alive and kept all of my babies alive in utero, has not failed to beat in these four years. How is it possible? How can a heart keep beating, keep pumping blood, still keep perfect time and synchronization with every other faculty, when it is thoroughly broken?
Did you see me crying on the floor, holding your little shirts and pajamas in my hands, clinging to them for dear life, but afraid to breathe them in because I thought I'd find you there? How odd that I'm afraid of your memory. How odd that I walk around every day, pretending that I'm okay, when I'm anything but. How odd that a person who I only knew for a little over three years, has the ability to completely shatter me. It's been longer without you than time with you, and yet, nothing has balanced out. How unfair that I should go through the remainder of my life with such a hole inside of me.
You were just here, and yet, it's as though you never were. Your story ended, and mine still goes on. How sad a story it is, but I keep on writing it. I write it for you, Garrett. I write it for your brothers and sisters and your daddy. I write it in hopes that one day, they will look back and know how hard I fought. How I waged a battle each and every day, and how I made the choice to keep fighting. Four years ago tonight was the last time I would ever cuddle your sweet warmth against me. How I wish I'd known our time was so short and that your breaths that remained were so very numbered. I would have held you longer. I wouldn't have slept that night, but rather I would have memorized every fraction of your soul.
The world has moved on, and this planet has made four revolutions around the sun. And here I am, mourning you and loving you with the greatest amount of love and pain that one could ever conjure. I hope that if you still exist, that you have not forgotten me. Perhaps this pain inside my heart and every atom that makes me who I am, is what connects me to you. The hurt in me cannot be measured, for there aren't numbers big enough to account for this kind of anguish, or this kind of love. You are my child, and my heart is still the house of pieces of you. You were here. You lived, and I love you forever.
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