I hate mustard. Not only the condiment, but the color. Mustard yellow. The same color as the ugly curtains that hung in my room for most of my life. So when I finally got new curtains, I chose a pretty baby blue shade.
Lying on my bed, I stared at my new blue curtains. The soft and semi-opaque fabric moved as the wind breathed through them, my windows wide open. I felt the breeze brush my cheeks.
So why did I want to rip these curtains off?
I took a bite of my string cheese and cringed at the plastic taste. I chewed for a minute, unable to swallow.
It had been a day since the funeral, and my appetite had completely vanished.
My brother had died, and my mom was crying.
My brother had died, and nothing tasted good.
Everything left a bitter taste in my mouth.
Food takes about a day to digest fully. The string cheese would take a few hours to move to the small intestine and churn with the stomach’s chemicals. Then, another few hours for it to go through the small intestine and into the large intestine, where it would reside for a bit longer, until it was finally compacted and released.
Grief processes differently.
The grief I chewed on was like chewing glass. When I tried to swallow, sharp pieces pierced my throat. Pieces of memory choked me and made it hard to breathe in the most unexpected moments.
The Day I Changed My Curtains
Three days earlier, the same day I changed my curtains, my mom had invited some guests over for dinner.
I helped set the table with plates, napkins, and chopsticks, and picked some sesame leaves and lettuce from the small garden in the front yard. The sun was warm, shining onto my skin as I got dirt on my hands. After everything was set, I retreated to my room just in time for the guests to arrive. I didn’t feel like socializing with my hair in a craze.
I typed on my crappy laptop, finishing up a project that was due that night. While typing away, I heard my mom.
She’s… laughing?
I couldn’t tell if she was laughing really hard or screaming. The more I heard her screech, the more I contemplated going down to check what was going on.
Pieces of memory choked me and made it hard to breathe in the most unexpected moments.
I had to finish this project, though. She’s probably laughing, I told myself.
But what could the ruckus be about? Just as I was about to go down, I heard the front door slam. Then, quiet.
I tiptoed downstairs. Everyone was gone. The food, napkins, and plates were on the table, untouched.
An hour passed, and then another. The sun went down, and the light no longer shone through my blue curtains. Finally, my phone rang, a call from my mom. Quietly, she asked me to open the door. When I swung it open, I saw her standing in front of me with her brown dress on. Her eyes were teary.
Without a word, she started to put away the food, and I helped her. The air was tense, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Possibilities ran through my mind, but I couldn’t imagine what was about to come. After everything was put away, she called my other brother and sat us down.
“Nick got into a car accident.”
“성한이가 죽었어,” she added in Korean. He died.
I thought I misheard her.
It was the loudest silence I’ve ever heard.
If you stare hard enough at something, you can stop tears from forming. I stared at the brown dress my mother was wearing.
That night, lying on my bed, I wished I could go back to yesterday, when I still had yellow curtains.
Plucking Petals
My brother, Nick, was 24 years old. Even after he moved out, he always came over, and he rarely came without food. Some days it was pizza, other days it was sushi or pastries. He would often say I was more excited to see what he’d bring than to see him. He wasn’t wrong. I was excited for what he would bring.
Sometimes, he would record videos of me watching him bite into a stick of string cheese. A grin sprawled across his face as he watched my disgust every time he took another big bite. He knew my pet peeve was when people bite into their string cheese. He found that kind of stuff funny.
He found a lot of things funny. He was funny, not the mean kind of funny, but kind of unhinged. His big belly laugh made things feel lighter. He brought laughter and food to every room.
After Nick died, my family stopped attending church. It was hard to pray to a God who had just taken him away. So, we took a break. After a year, my parents decided it would be good for me to go to a new church. I agreed to go, it’s not like I could say no. But going to church was never the same.
Maybe it was the anger that made me zone out whenever it was time to pray. Perhaps it was the bitter sting I felt, refusing to speak to God. I was mad, furious. I just couldn’t understand why God plucked my brother off this earth. My face didn’t show it, but the thought of my brother fueled my refusal to say a word of prayer.
Everything irritated me, and everything I faced in the world made me angry.
As I walked, I plucked flowers out of the ground and threw them in the fire pit in front of my house. I would pick the prettiest flower I could find, pluck out its petals, and drop them one by one into the small, ashy fire pit. If I could pluck enough life from this damned ground, maybe it could be traded for a life more precious to me.
But no matter how many flowers I plucked from the ground, my brother never came back.
My brother is like the ashes of a fire pit, like the specks of lint sucked into a vacuum. How could someone who had so much life become so much as nothing? Are we all just nothing?
These thoughts flooded my head as I went through my day, vacuuming the floors, going to church, and taking a walk through my neighborhood. My thoughts ran faster than ever, and they never seemed to slow down.
I never bothered to share these thoughts with my family. My dad had already experienced a lot of loss in his life. He’d lost his brother, his dad—and now, his son. I didn’t want him to hurt more than he was already hurting, so I tried to hide my pain from him. He had always told me it hurt him to see me sad.
And even though my mom loved Nick dearly, she wasn’t his birth mother. So I didn’t think she would understand. On top of all that, it wasn’t the norm to express emotions in our household. It felt as if we were each in our bubbles, floating away to different corners.
My Brother’s Table
Whenever I came home from school, I shut myself in my room, doing nothing but filling the smooth pages of my journal with scribbles of dark ink. The ink smeared to the side of my hand, leaving a dark black stain. My hands always smelled like ink.
One line from the many I’d written: “I’m never hungry anymore.”
I used to enjoy the food my mother cooked, but I hadn’t finished a plate of her food in a while.
Despite my small appetite, one of the few things I would try to eat was pizza.
There’s an old school pizzeria two blocks from my house. After my brother passed away, I went there often. I’d order a slice of pizza and plop down at the same table every time. If my table was occupied, I’d leave and come back another time.
But it wasn’t really my table. It was my brother’s.
I used to go there when I was younger to satisfy my craving for pepperoni poppers, and I would often run into him, sitting at his table with a friend, a big pizza in front of him.
One day, two strangers were sitting there. Instead of leaving, I ordered a slice and sat nearby. I kept glancing at them, trying to imagine my brother might appear if I looked over enough. I wish I had sat with him when I had the chance.
When the strangers caught me looking at them, my face turned a shade of red, and I called my dad to come pick me up.
We made a quick stop at the deli, and as we drove back home with croissants and coffee in our hands, my father glanced at the neighboring train station.
“You know your brother got arrested once for sitting on the edge of the train platform.”
Turning toward him, I tilted my head. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I was so mad at him. He was fearless; that’s why I worried about him. He was like me.”
My father was still staring out the window, unable to tear his eyes away from the platform.
Maybe this was my dad’s pizzeria.
Sinking Together
The first time my family visited my brother together at the cemetery was on his birthday in August. It had been almost a year since his death.
As we walked over to his jar of ashes, I fidgeted with my fingers.
For a moment, I glanced at my mom and saw her heart aching through her watery eyes. She was hurting. Probably even more than me.
Maybe my parents understood me more than I gave them credit for.
Maybe even though we didn’t always understand each other, there was a common understanding that we were all sinking together.
And that felt easier than sinking alone.
After we left, we stopped by a restaurant to have some dinner. We ordered marinated beef, and the lady cooked it on a fire in front of us.
I watched as the bloody beef got tossed around on the cast iron pan, burning on some sides.
My family took their chopsticks and each grabbed a piece of meat. I took one too, and we all started chewing together.
After chewing for a minute, I swallowed. The taste of the ashy parts remained in my mouth.
I still see my brother in the little things. Every time I pass by a pizzeria, smell cream puffs, or chew on string cheese. I’m not angry anymore, but the pieces in my throat still choke me sometimes.
The Author
