my bestest boy

The boy in the picture for a moment.

I changed my display picture to a photo of me when I was five. Before the grief, before the weight of her gone. It was Mother's Day, or close enough to it, and the world wouldn't stop spinning. The date, May 10th will forever now sneak up on me like a whisper with a knife in its teeth. It’ll be a year soon. I miss her more in silence than I do in sound.

I wonder if you'd recognize me in that picture. That boy with wide eyes and a crooked smile, his shirt stained with juice, tucked in and happy. It was as the kind of face that still believed mothers were immortal and love never ran out.

You used to call me your bestest boy. I never corrected you. Never told you that phrase alone made me feel like someone’s son again.

I'm getting married soon to her. Yeah. It's strange to even write that. She’s kind. Good. Steady. I think that’s what people look for when they’re done searching for what they used to burn for. I keep telling myself love changes shape. That maybe the fire doesn’t go out, it just cools to warmth that won’t blister your skin when you touch it.

But if I’m honest, sometimes I wonder if I'll ever miss you the right way. Or if I already do. I sometimes wonder if you sucked a part of my soul or understood it too well and I feared that you did both too well.

It’s in the quietest things, when your favorite song comes on in the car and I skip it too quickly. When I eat something you once made fun of me for ordering. When someone says something funny, and I almost text you.

This marriage, it feels like the closing of a chapter I never quite finished reading. The boy in that picture didn’t know heartbreak. He didn’t know what it meant to lose a mother. Or a girl who made his world make sense, if only for a while.

I put that photo up because I needed to see who I was before all this. Before the mourning. Before the compromises. Before the version of me who now buys rings and will smile through anniversaries of absence.

I think, maybe, I’m mourning him. The boy who loved you like it was certain to continue loving.

I am not sure he still does but I know far deep in his memory is the image of you buried. And maybe in another life we may meet again on different grounds.