To my beloved grief, 

Who comforts me with bittersweet prayers,

I ask you to listen to my pen through silent thoughts you scream at me.

Know that I tried, I really did, to understand your fight.

But I asked too soon what should never be asked. 

I asked him if he was scared.

But I don’t remember what he said.

Because right after, he asked me if I believed in God.

As short-term memories go, he doesn't remember my answer.

And I thought about your grip on my throat.

He would tell me about how he would play gigs with his brother, when he was 20.

Strumming chords to make angels sing the devil's song,

He told me of the drugs, hidden in curled up socks backstage.

And I wonder if that’s what caused it.

I imagine smoke dancing into his brain

Causing acid rain that builds up a tumor.

It’s rumor, that memories fade over time,

But he doesn’t remember crossing the finish line into hell-born sickness.

And I wish the thickness of my brain will grow but I tend to understand what it means when doctors say “metastasized” and “spinal fluid”.

I wish you would stop amplifying the diagnosis.

Sometimes, through the glassy eye daze of ignoring history class decades

I daydream of catching mocking birds.

Hoping they’ll sing love to our cancers, and ignore the mocking noise of ‘accepting by growing up’.

I accept saying goodbye but don’t tell me to accept the pain he’s in.

He isn’t himself at all anymore

If I could, I would take away his pain like lightning bolts into my veins and find a cure,

though I don’t know how to make a vaccine.

I know how to cook.

So, in the middle of solving problems in math class, I bubble cloud my way into making his favorite snack;

Fried Green Tomatoes.

And season it with mocking bird feathers,

Hoping it will wind into a rope to tether away the possibilities, of saying good-bye.

And being told he is going to a better place.

Sometimes,

Late at night, I blame you for numbing my cheeks with raw salt that leads me into a downward spiral of tinted glasses.

Living in the color blue, is often overlooked, and it makes me feel guilty.

Because while I'm curled up in self pity,

He is puking up his dinner,

And his muscles are vibrating like he is paying for sinners.

And I feel guilty.

Because no one ever taught me how to pray, but that’s what they tell me to do.

Don't you know, my one and only grief

that I wish my knowledge was as tiny as my hands when I clasp them together and ask,

“Are you there God? It’s me, a nobody.”

Because I wonder if out of a million begging hands, I will be considered ‘special’.

And he will listen.

Because my Uncle is dying.

But thousands of children are starving.

And bombs keep going off.

And I feel my hands shake with frustration as I cry, and do nothing.

I often wonder if he, too, prays, or if he has forgotten that as well.

Along with recipes and old faces.

A dying body forces the heart into unfair races that he will never win.

He doesn’t even know where the finish line is.

And all this I think about, until my heavy eyes surrender salty dreams that never relieve,

Because I don’t know what to believe, anymore.

All I know, is that you, an improbable card trick of love,

Are not helping me understand. 

So, I asked him if he was scared,

Because so was I.

I don’t remember what he said,

Because right after, he asked me if I believed in god.

And even if he doesn’t remember my answer, I still feel guilty for saying it.

He asked me if I believed in god,

And I said,

“Not lately.”

Too many road signs point to the obvious,

I wish I could give out my faith like he gave me his lifelong copies of The Lord of the Rings.

But at that moment,

I just as well wrote ‘hope’ down on a piece of paper and lit it on fire.

I tell him,

That it feels fake to pray to a lair because all the good people, tend to die young.

He looked at me and did something that momentarily lifted all the weight knowing truth behind evil.

As if he was a priest in a Cathedral preaching to me,

He quoted a movie,

Just like he used to.

It goes through my mind every day and I start to wonder, that maybe, nothing was ever wrong with his brain.

Because he looked at me that day and said that “God is in the rain.”

He told me to keep trying.

And I do,

Because the last time I saw him,

The heavens were crying.

I still don't know if you are with me or not,

But the other day I danced in the rain,

and for once in a long while,

I didn't feel your pain.