Seven years ago today the darkness swallowed you up and grief started eating away at what was left of the rest of us. Seven is a hard number to fathom, just like all the rest before. Seven years into the madness of missing you and now I am pretty sure that it never gets better than it is right now.

There is some weird security in the grief settling into a deep chronic pain. Permanent and pressed against my skin so tightly that I know the two shall never separate. Permanent and searing so deep I expect for strangers on the street to see it plainly scarred on my face. For people to smell the burnt flesh of it it as I walk past. For them to know, “that is a person who has lost” just by watching my unsteady gait. The security that accompanies the pain is proof that sometimes it feels like all I have left of you is the grief. I feel a wave of the pain coming now and I take a deep breath, knowing how to greet its discomfort and desperately wanting to hug you, instead.

There is also a weird feeling of claustrophobia in knowing this pain will go nowhere. Sometimes I wake from a dream gasping for breath, certain that the last time my lungs filled was the last time I heard your voice. Sometimes I feel like the weight of missing you is so heavy on my back that standing feels impossible. That bearing the weight of it takes a strength I’m not always sure I have and consumes me until there’s almost nothing left. That every second I am continuing on takes effort and stamina and endurance of my weary heart and shattered soul. All of it evidence of how big we loved.

You’ve taken pieces of me with you and I never want them back. I want you to hold them on tightly wherever you and your beautiful light are. I want you to tuck them into your pockets so you know that I loved you with everything I had and shine them back at me when the light hits the water on a rare brilliant summer day. You take those pieces of me and I will gather the pieces of you and try to cobble together a life that has joy alongside the pain. Your light is still bigger than the darkness that eclipsed your brightness that day.

I miss your laugh that seems to have faded in memory in my minds ear.

I miss you when it rains so hard the wipers in my car (that you’d hate, by the way) can’t keep up.

I miss you when my face cracks open with laughter and I suddenly feel a brief levity, a relief, a calm.

I miss you, co-keeper of our childhood memories. Co-captain of deciding to throw away a video game when we were 9 and 12 because we didn’t want to keep fighting about it. Keeper of so much light and knower of my darkness, that was sometimes so much like yours. Hours spent on the phone describing the way it clouded over your reality sometimes. Hours spent telling you everything I have always known to be true- that you were too important to leave and that my life would never be the same without you. You always doubted me on that one but I wouldn’t be the oldest sibling without a part of me hoping that now you can see that I was always right about that one. I miss your beautiful, miraculous softness that I was so lucky to get to see and I miss the fierce protectiveness of a little brother who always went to the dark basement ahead of me with a butterknife, just in case the darkness was ever dumb enough to mess with his sister.

Seven years and the ache grows and softens and grows and softens in ways that I don’t always have words for.

Seven years without you and my whole life to go.

I’ll miss you until my last lucid moment.

With your heart,

Sis.