I feel partially melted to the bed, I'm so tired.

I don't know how I went through this before. I mean, I know I did because I recognize the fatigue; forgetting to eat and then eating too much of the closest wrong thing; dropping everything to stare into space. At least this time I'm aware- one burger tastes good at the time, one every day will not. Cigarettes still taste like shit, even if the people you're smoking with make you feel better. There is still life to live, even if the one person in the whole world you could never think of their heart stopping (how could that heart, T's heart, simply...stop?) has indeed stopped.

It's the most staggering oxymoron. T's heart. Stopped.

I think in the back of my mind I've been waiting for the four horseman to pull up next to me at the stoplight, all week. Watching the sun slide down my sky into S. and L. and C'las, my first thought was "How can a sun rise anywhere in a world without T?"

When my brother died in 1992, he left the house in the middle of the night. We woke up to an empty bed. Hideous, but there was a mercy to it, that in my own mind for years I was able to think that he had just gone off somewhere and that at some point I'd run into him (my oldest brother had done something like that when I was 14). It was enough to get me out of adolescence and moving towards adulthood with a grain of sanity.

Seventeen years later and I'm living in an Islamic country, looking out the window at the world sliding away from a sun that rises in a world without T. I have everything to tell me that T is right there when I need it- The Law of The Conservation of Energy, Islam, Christianity, Pop Rocks.

No amount of these things will fill the empty seat next to me. No hand to pass those Pop Rocks.

A fellow teacher about...7 years ago...told me that the one drive more powerful than sex is the drive for shared experience between humans. No one had put it to me quite that way before, but yes.