(There’s something that I keep in my pocket, a piece of dental floss, flavourless now, chewed to a white nothing by my own mouth to wring out every strand of his DNA, but now it just tastes of me and nothing else.)

My sister was wearing a black dress made of crepe. I remember it so well, the way it scrunched up in my fingers like paper, my knuckles juxtaposed against the colour, white with tension, against a bottomless backdrop of black. I held onto that dress like a terrified child. For that moment, it was the only thing that existed for me.

gotta sit here, gotta stay, gotta sit here.

(Memories of bumblebees with their innards hanging out,
“make it start mama, make it start!” it’s a common reaction amongst children so I’m told.)

I did not feel his soul sliding past me. I didn’t feel a thing, not a single thing.
Is it the same as turning off a TV? Energy dispersing into the ether? A kettle boiling, bubbles stilling? How can he have just…stopped?

He stopped.

I have felt many things in my life. The whole spectrum, from dizzing highs to drug doped ecstasies, suicidal jaunts to white-edged nothingnesses. But I had never felt abandoned before. Not truly, sincerely, abandoned. Marooned. Bitter. Desperately bitter. Terribly, terribly frightened and deeply alone.

There’s nothing like the smell of flowers to jolt the senses.

I let go of my sister’s dress and walked – not ran -  but walked out into the daylight.
I remember that I had my head held high - I could have just been going for a smoke, going to make a phone call, going to check that the sky was still up in the air and not down on the floor like a carpet of bluebells , but when I reached the door of the church I started to run.
I ran right in front of cars – **** it! – across the road to a half deserted carpark, winding through the cars like a ******, and slunk down to the floor in front of a parked white van. I thumped my head against the cool metal of the bumper and started to shake. I remember my body feeling somehow too big and too small all at once, I remember laughing at one point because it seemed like the right thing to do. My shaved head hit my knees with a thwack.
I’m not here, I’m not real, I’m a black and white thing, I’m just a black and white thing...
But I was real, and there was no escaping it. All of it was real. The carpark was real. The flowers were real. The only thing that was not real was the thing that mattered the most.
“You ****.”
I got up. I started to kick the van, kick the wall behind me, and kick the air.
You read about it in stories and you see it in films, people losing their marbles and hitting out, heroically bleeding from the knuckles, stinging, saying ‘ah, ah.’ None of that happened for me. I hit so hard I thought I’d broken my hand, but my bones are ******* stubborn. The world is ******* stubborn. My mouth felt like it was bleeding, but it was just laced in a cobweb of spit.
“You ****! You ****! You ****!”
I took off my suit jacket and draped it over my head, pulling it tight; a black ghost in a carpark in the countryside.
I felt an arm wind its way around my waist, and the rustle of crepe.
I sobbed up my grief like catarrh, the lining of my jacket wet with spit and the inevitable chawing tempest of tears that caved in my stomach like a perfect punch.
“I’m losing my mind.”
My sister grabbed onto my hand and squeezed, hard.
“No you’re not, Arthur.” She said to me, with certainty.
“No you’re not.”