"A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

― Philippe Ariès

​

Every memory with you feels like a lifetime ago. Your Speedmaster still makes the same
ticking noise, but I can no longer decipher what it says.

 

In a way, my life stopped at sixteen, but your hands held all the tenderness I have ever had in
my life. Now and again, I try to track you on the radio to see how far long you are on your
resplendent journey on the other side of everything, and I just assume the journey you are
on is long; there is no way for me to know. If you ever want to tell me about it, I am still in
your room grappling with 2018 and trying my best not to sink.

 

You were and always will be the closest to God I will ever be, and I am still grappling with
everything that happened afterwards, and just like God, you occupy me with a sleepless
hunger. Since you, I have both left God and home and have subsequently returned to them
both. Some days, I feel you are a little less around me, and I am afraid those days will
become more frequent moving forward.

 

In the Southern Hemisphere, the days mostly just melt into each other, and my grief, my
grief comes in paroxysms. If you were with me, I would muster all my courage and tell you
about all the secrets I cannot keep, the fears I have had, and the things that have made me
feel inadequate over the years. And about how much Dhaka and Canberra have changed
and all the things that have remained the same. Most days, I wake up sweating through my
sheets, mulling over what life has made of me, and cutting myself over and over what a
sixteen-year-old me would think of me, about what you think you would think of who I
have become at twenty-two.

 

All my language is not enough to account for my apology for not being able to be half the
brother you deserved and for not writing anything worthwhile when you were around. So
please accept this eulogy over half a decade later.

​

My grief keeps finding me on bright Saturday afternoons in dairy aisles, when I am about to 
leave for work or when I am bowing to God, and every time ammu’s hands' quiver. And my
guilt is always there. If you ever get the chance, tell me what heaven is like; tell me there is
a meadow, and afterwards, assure me there is a very good reason for you not being here with
me. At the very least, just let me know you are doing okay, better than ever. All is full of love
around you.

 

If you were still here, you would know how I write too slow for any of it to stick. How in
search of permanence, I keep trying to decorate and redecorate my room, yet any space I
find fills with your loss. In this new decade, we are too newfangled to have answer
machines. Maybe if we were not and we still had one, I would change the apology it plays
for your absence and replace it with unplugged takes on all the music I got from your
library back in ‘12.​

​

There's no healing out of my grief, for we are not mighty; we cannot change the pattern of
the stars or the course of our lives, but my devotion to you will outlive empires.

​

“I tell myself / there's not a world /
without my brother in it. / I tell myself /
I'd follow him anywhere / to keep the world /

from ending.”
- Dustin Pearson