The picture was tagged as ‘Alexander Anderson’; I clicked on the resulting link which took me to his profile. His profile had become an ‘in memoriam’ page.

Twins. They were twins.

All right, Galileo. I get it.

Christmas sucked – but not really for the reasons I’d expected.

Uncharacteristically, I had been dreading the break; break meant no school, and no school meant no June, which meant no tethers, no soft, cushiony landing, no reason not to spend entire days staring at the wall or scrolling through the ToD. Foolishly, on the drive back from the last day of classes for the year, I had thought maybe she’d invite me over or give me something or insist that she found the thought of two weeks without me criminal, just as I thought of two weeks without her. But I didn’t get any of that. Just a promise to text and an awkwardly diagonal hug over cup holders.

I was afraid of myself when left to my own devices. I didn’t like that person much in the fleeting moments I encountered her, and I certainly wasn’t interested in being handcuffed to her.

Christmas. The grief book in Dad’s office had warned that today would be bad. I woke up feeling mostly empty. Tired, but that wasn’t anything new; I still wasn’t sleeping much, because I couldn’t sit in the dark for any considerable amount of time without a variety of awful thoughts intruding, spinning around on my brainstem, pole dancing, mocking me. Instead, I opted for playing video games or watching movies until I passed out, then I’d wake up in the middle of the night with the title music humming faintly. But this morning I couldn’t even bring myself to open my eyes. Christmas. Dad loved it. The minute after midnight on Thanksgiving he’d feed me a steady diet of those Claymation Christmas specials, which were all sort of creepy but in an endearing way. I liked the uncanny-valley-ness of them, all the jerking unnatural motions sort of reminiscent of how I felt I navigated through the world. Especially today. Especially today, because today I was due to have an anniversary reaction, a reaction I’d have for at least ten years and probably for the rest of my life – every Christmas and every birthday forever there’d be a Dad-shaped hole, where I’ll remember in vivid technicolour that he should be here, he should see me graduate and get married and grow old and for fuck’s sake, he should at least be here on Christmas so we can –

Breathe.

June.