...because you are still able to hide from yourself.”

I take my sisters to the grave again.  We stand awkward, they believing, showing somehow with bends of elbow, knee, foot, neck, that we come here too much, that I ask them, that we all go up this hill to where I buried my brother.

“It’s not like he’s there you know, you do know that right” Kayla says to me.  I know.  Kasha touches her to say no, to disapprove of what Kay said without using words.  To say she hit her would not be telling the truth, but she hit her.  Kayla tells her no.

“I was never there.  Not enough.” 

“He’s still here.” Kayla tells me, says that my brother, like the force, is all around us, in us, alive. 

The things we take from each other, words, mannerisms, mostly people have taken from me though it feels prideful to say such a thing, to acknowledge it., those things are no more the life than a photo, a memory, copy of the story he wrote about us dying.  He mostly lives in Kayla now.  You could say they are the same person, we all have beliefs.  In my world he rides high skys in white, hair, beauty, bare hands and feet, gods own sword, him alone trusted with that strength, smiling, so far above us all, so fucking beautiful.

“I love you.” I tell the small hump of earth where I have laid the Lillie and planted the Popsicle stick cross, fitting grave for a gold fish, a farie, my brother.

“I’m not coming again.” Kayla says walking back down the hill.  She says it to us both but mostly to Kasha, I have stopped listening to hear.  Kasha is crying and puts her hand on my arm to come.  I hold the barbed wire apart for them.  The rage has gone.  Back, settled, the silt of my cup, the only cup. 

“This is such bullshit.”  She is a fighter.  A different truth.  She will not hide our pain, my pain, build walls around it, worship in it like me in my church of willow, sandstone and dark.

We are eating.  Kasha is happy.  I am lost.  Kayla see’s us both with a lens not real.  I did not think I was broken.  She will not give us wings.  I have never seen her fly away, I swear, I have never seen her fly away from us.

“Do you know why it’s not hell...