Numbness is but one feeling

My brother conveyed it best.

“When we were kids, we saw them as nothing but titans. We saw them as pillars,” he said to me, and took a long inhale on his cigar. The crisp black sky had opened up to swallow us. We hid under our feelings. I puffed on my cigarette and we continued talking on why there could be no god and where He could have gone. I tried to find the stars but the streetlights took from me my one solace. Instead, I stared at my feet.

Several minutes before, I had been told that my gramma had blood cancer, a type of cancer I was unfamiliar with. But then I am unfamiliar with most cancers, this one certainly didn’t ring any bells. I was on the phone with mom and she waited for me to cry, to whimper, to wail, to weep, and all I had for her were questions.

“Are they sure? Can they test her again? What does this mean? Will she survive the chemo? When will the treat her?” One by one I fired them off. And one by one my mom shot them down with nary an answer. Not long after, I hung up the phone and sat on the edge of my bed, questioning existence and its worth, whether it had one or not. Eventually, the tears flowed. It was expected. I never saw my gramma as weak, even though for the past several years her health had been up and down. Like every grandkid knows, gramma and grampa are invincible. We take that with us, from our youth, our adolescence, to adulthood. No matter how wise we become, it still never gets through our head.

When I was able to stop the flood of sadness, when I was able to quell the sadness, I walked downstairs and went outside. My brother was in the kitchen. I knew he knew, a look into his eyes was more than I needed.

“Where you going?” he asked and I responded with “Going out for a smoke.” He decided to join me and together, under a nightmare of black sky, we smoked and discussed what we were feeling.

He said, and then I concurred that our grandparents were pillars. They were so tall, and us, so miniscule. We touched on subjects that were deemed taboo in our living conditions. Girlfriends, love interests, death, living arrangements, stresses, depressions, our single joys all wrapped up in one monotonous laugh shared briefly while smoke curled around our eyes. It hid the tears, it hid the frustration.

He talked about the grandparents we knew, how our gramma’s word was law in this family. I talked about how things would have been much different if they’d never moved back to the tribe. My brother argued that there were too many benefits here that they wouldn’t be privy to if they didn’t live on tribal lands, or at least near them. In the end, the tribe became the enemy, for they gave and gave and gave and all they got in return were lazy workers, thiefs, maniacs, and a few good men. Perhaps the few were what kept the pieces from faltering.

I stayed in his presence for as long as I could, before my exhaustion betrayed me and I decided to attempt sleep, knowing well that it would be hard to obtain. I laid in bed, staring at the wall, clutching my morals and wondering where my dreams would take me. I asked for a night without dreams, but I got a night without sleep. I was going crazy, with confusion, sadness, depression and the occasional suicidal thought. Because think about it, how hard is it to slit that vein anyway?

When morning came, I was shocked that I could sleep, that I had slept. It seemed so hazy. My dreams made no sense but they involved me and my grandparents at the Safeway in Seattle that they used to go to often. Amazing how I remembered every detail of that store, from the parking lot, to its location, to the aisles. And yet, I couldn’t remember my grandparents’ faces. Perhaps they had none.

I hit snooze on the alarm clock. I watched the numbers change and waited for the clock to go off again. Eventually, I rose from my bed. I remember nothing of how I got to work. When I arrived at my offices, I laughed. Because everyone there was trivial, and I felt real.

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