The morning after you were gone

I remember feeling like I wanted to write in blood or roll in the
hay, I wanted to do something pure, and with feeling. I wanted to put
my hand into the flame, just to see how it would feel. I remember once
reading in a magazine somewhere that our bodies are 80\% moisture and
that, we are, essentially made from water. I remember wondering why
then, I had lost the ability to cry. I had lost the ability to feel. I
could cry at the ending of 'Stand By Me' or at the part in Jeff
Buckley's version of 'Hallelujah' where he goes for the really high
note, so why couldn't I cry the morning after you died.

I never saw it coming. None of us did. You were never supposed to die.
Like, ever. I remember being a child and my Grandfather putting on that
song, 'An Apple For The Teacher' on your old record player and telling
me that you and him had written and recorded it, whilst he mimed along
with the salt pot, making me believe this crazy tale. Thinking that you
were responsible for the 'do wops' and him the tale of an infatuated
teacher. I remember the egg box monster/caterpillar hybrid that lived
under the fridge. I remember the brilliant chips that you cooked me,
starting off my love affair with fatty food. I remember the backs of
corn-flakes packets that you saved for me so that I could make castles
and the like out of them. I guess I'm just a twenty-year-old boy
looking back on a pretty magical childhood and a particularly close
bond with my grandmother, but it feels so fresh and so pure. A memory
which is mine and mine only. No-one can get at the part of my brain
where I keep that memory. It's mine forever.

I sometimes wonder about what happens when a person goes senile. What
happens to the memories that they can't obtain anymore? Where do they
go and how come the doors that lead to those memories are suddenly
blocked off? Its like, and you knew that I didn't believe in heaven or
any of that crap, what happens when you die? Where do you go? Not your
wrinkled old body and your wire wool hair, but YOU. The entity that I
loved so dearly. You can't just disappear into nothing. It defies
logic. I'd like to see you one more time, even if it's only in my
dreams. I'd like to just see you smile when I've done something good,
just one more time.

I couldn't understand who I was the morning after you were gone. I
couldn't understand why I couldn't allow the boy in me out of the
cumbersome teenager that stopped me from embracing the pain and hurt
that I really was feeling. I don't understand why, in the darkest
regions of my heart, I still feel the need to run away from my life and
find the quietest place I can find and just wail, whenever I think of
you. I wanted to write this for you Grandma, just because sometimes I
worry that I don't think of you enough. I wanted you to know why I try
not to think of you. But that I love you, and I miss you.