Melancholy

I think some people are born with an emptiness inside them. Not necessarily a wound, because a wound implies that something happened to create it. Something tore, something broke, something was taken. But what do you call an absence that has existed for as long as you can remember? How do you grieve something you cannot recall ever having? I've spent most of my life trying to find the origin of a sadness that seems to predate my own understanding of it. Something ancient and aching, buried so deeply beneath my skin that I can no longer distinguish where it ends and I begin. Melancholy. Such a delicate word for something that has spent a lifetime quietly devouring me.

I don't remember ever being entirely happy. I remember moments of happiness, certainly. Laughter that made my stomach hurt. Days when the sunlight felt warm instead of intrusive. People whose presence made the world seem a little less unbearable. But even in those moments, there was always something underneath. A heaviness I couldn't explain. As though joy were something I could visit but never inhabit. I could stand in the middle of a beautiful moment, recognize its beauty, even feel grateful for it, and still sense that familiar sadness breathing somewhere beneath my ribs. It never really went away. It simply learned to be quiet when other people were listening.

For years, I thought everyone lived this way. That everyone carried some inexplicable sorrow around inside them, tucked neatly behind their smiles and ordinary conversations. I became exceptionally good at existing in the space between feeling everything and revealing nothing. I learned to laugh while something inside me ached. To love people while quietly anticipating their absence. To be surrounded by life and still feel strangely removed from it, like I was watching the world through a window I could never quite figure out how to open.

And then Chris took his own life.

There are things that happen to a person that cannot be adequately described as loss. Loss is too small a word. Too tidy. It suggests that something has gone missing, that there is an identifiable space where it once belonged. But when Chris died, it wasn't simply that my brother was no longer here. Something fundamental inside me came apart. Something I hadn't even realized was holding me together. And whatever it was, it did not survive him.

I think what people fail to understand about grief is that sometimes it doesn't arrive as a new emotion. Sometimes it finds something that was already there and makes itself at home. I was sad long before Chris died. I carried that sadness through childhood, through adolescence, through every version of myself I can remember. But there was still something intact beneath it. Some small, unidentifiable part of me that believed the world could be endured because certain people existed within it. Chris was one of those people. Perhaps the most important one. He knew me before I learned to disguise myself. Before I became so practiced at swallowing my own pain that I sometimes forgot I was choking on it. He knew the little girl who existed beneath everything life would eventually do to her. And he loved her without requiring her to become someone easier to understand. There is a particular cruelty in losing someone who knew you before the world taught you to hide.

Because when someone dies, they take a witness with them. Someone who remembered your childhood without needing an explanation, who understood the language of your silences, who could recognize something was wrong before you ever found the words to say it. But Chris was more than a witness to my life. He was somehow woven into the very experience of being me. We were siblings, but even that word feels inadequate for what existed between us. Mom used to call us soul twins. She said our connection was so strong that we would find each other in every lifetime, regardless of who we were or where we ended up. And I believed her. Not because I needed to believe in something mystical, but because I had spent my entire life experiencing something I couldn't explain any other way.

We joked about having twin telepathy. Twinepathy, as ridiculous as that sounds. But there was something almost unsettling about how deeply attuned we were to one another. Physical pain, emotional distress, an inexplicable shift in the other's well-being. Sometimes I would know something was wrong before there was any reasonable way for me to know. A sickening feeling would settle somewhere deep inside my body, and I would instinctively reach for him. Other times, he would know something was happening to me without my having said a word. It was as though we shared an interconnected nervous system, two separate bodies operating from some invisible, common source. I can't prove any of that. I know how it sounds. I only know what it felt like to live inside that connection. And I know what it felt like when it stopped.

I've spent eight years trying to describe what happened when Chris died, and I think I've been approaching it incorrectly. I keep speaking about him as though he were something outside of me that was taken away. As though grief were the hollow space left behind when someone you love disappears. But Chris never felt entirely separate from me. He felt like an organ. Something essential and living, buried so deeply within my own anatomy that I had never considered the possibility of existing without it. I didn't have to consciously think about him any more than I had to think about my heart beating or my lungs expanding. He was simply there. A vital part of the machinery that kept me alive.

And when he died, it wasn't like losing someone who had been standing beside me. It was like something inside my own body suddenly stopped functioning. Except nobody removed it. The parts of me that belonged to him. The parts of him that existed inside me. All those invisible places where our lives had grown together so completely that there was no longer a distinguishable boundary between us. When he died, those parts died, too. But they didn't disappear. They stayed inside me, severed from whatever had once sustained them, slowly decomposing while the rest of my body continued its ordinary insistence on survival.

Maybe that is what this darkness actually is. Maybe the thing I have spent all these years describing as depression, as melancholy, as some bottomless and inexplicable sorrow, is the slow decomposition of everything inside me that died with him. Maybe I have been mistaking the smell of something rotting for the familiar scent of my own sadness. Maybe this unbearable heaviness isn't simply the weight of his absence, but the weight of what remains. All those pieces of us that were never meant to exist independently, decaying somewhere beneath my ribs, poisoning everything around them.

People talk about losing a piece of themselves when someone dies. But a missing piece suggests an absence. An empty cavity. Something that could, theoretically, be filled or healed over. What I feel is not empty in that way. It is crowded. Suffocating. Full of things that no longer have any business remaining inside me, and yet refuse to leave. Memories that still have nerve endings. Love that continues sending signals to someone who can no longer receive them. Instincts that still reach for him before my conscious mind can remind me that he is dead.

Mom said we would find each other in every lifetime. I think about that more often than I care to admit. But I don't know whether that thought comforts me anymore. Because if she was right, if there really was something in us that recognized the other beyond the ordinary boundaries of a single life, then perhaps that explains why losing him has felt so profoundly unnatural. Why eight years have passed and my body still behaves as though something essential has been violently torn from it. Why I can intellectually understand that he is gone while some deeper, more ancient part of me continues searching for him. Sometimes I wonder whether some part of me is still standing in September of 2018, waiting for the world to correct itself. Waiting for the sickening feeling to pass. Waiting for him to answer the invisible call I had spent my entire life trusting he would hear. But the world never corrected itself.

People speak about time as though it possesses some extraordinary healing property. As though the accumulation of days will eventually soften the sharpest edges of what happened. But time has done something different to me. It has allowed the deterioration to continue. And while the damage his death left inside me remains painfully present, the details of the actual person are becoming harder to preserve. I am forgetting things I never wanted to forget. The exact cadence of certain words in his voice. The ordinary expressions that once crossed his face. The insignificant details I never thought to memorize because I never imagined there would come a day when remembering them would be my only means of experiencing them again. There is something particularly cruel about feeling the consequences of his death with such extraordinary clarity while the living, breathing person I would give anything to remember becomes increasingly difficult to reach… And all the while, the melancholy continues to spread.

The sadness I carried before Chris died was heavy, but it was familiar. I had lived with it long enough to recognize its boundaries. But after his death, the darkness no longer stayed where I had learned to keep it. It reached places I hadn't known were vulnerable, contaminating memories, relationships, ordinary moments of peace. I began to experience happiness with an almost immediate sense of dread, as though anything beautiful were simply something I hadn't lost yet. Love became inseparable from terror. Attachment became an exercise in anticipating devastation. I could no longer experience the presence of someone I loved without being painfully aware of how easily that presence could become another permanent absence.

There have been people who made the sadness quieter. People whose presence made me feel, however briefly, as though the damage inside me had stopped progressing. And God, how desperately I have wanted to believe that meant something was healing. But there is a difference between something being healed and something being temporarily anesthetized. The absence of pain is not always evidence that the injury has disappeared. Sometimes it simply means you've found something powerful enough to distract your nervous system from what is happening beneath the surface. And when that distraction disappears, everything is still there.

I can love someone with every functioning part of myself and still feel the decay beneath that love. I can experience genuine happiness and still know that it has not reached the places where Chris died inside me. I can be grateful for my life and simultaneously feel as though I am being slowly consumed by something I cannot identify, cannot remove, and cannot make stop. I think that is what frightens me most. Not that I will never experience happiness again, but that happiness will always exist alongside this.

I think that is what people misunderstand about surviving something devastating. They assume that because the body continues functioning, whatever was damaged inside it must have eventually repaired itself. They see a person going through the motions of an ordinary life and mistake movement for recovery. But bodies are capable of extraordinary compensation. They can learn to function around damaged tissue, adapt to things that should have made ordinary existence impossible. And maybe that is what I have been doing for eight years. Not healing. Not recovering. Simply learning how to keep the rest of myself alive around something that never recovered from dying.

And I am tired of trying to make this sound less terrible than it is. I am tired of searching for beautiful language to describe something that has made so much of my existence feel unbearable. Tired of turning my grief into something meaningful enough for other people to admire. Tired of being told that the depth of my sorrow is evidence of the depth of my love, as though that makes the living of it any less excruciating. I know I loved Chris. I know I still do. I do not need eight years of suffering to prove it. I would have loved him just as fiercely if he had lived. I would have loved him through gray hair and old age and all the mundane, uneventful years we were supposed to get together.

I wanted to love him while he was alive. I wanted the privilege of growing old with my brother. Of collecting decades of memories that didn't have to be carefully preserved because there would always be another opportunity to make more. I wanted the ridiculous conversations, the inside jokes, the ability to pick up the phone and tell him something completely insignificant simply because I knew he would understand why I found it funny. I wanted the ordinary luxury of knowing he existed somewhere in the world, even when we weren't speaking. The quiet biological certainty that my twin half was still out there, living a life that remained connected to mine.

I didn't need his death to teach me how much he mattered. And I cannot romanticize what it did to me. Because the truth is that I was already empty in ways I never understood. Chris didn't create the happiness I was missing, but he made the emptiness less lonely. He was proof that someone could know the ugliest, most complicated parts of me and still love me without hesitation. He was a place where I did not have to translate myself. I could feel completely alienated from the rest of the world and still know there was someone walking around inside it whose nervous system seemed to recognize mine. And then he was gone.

I have wondered whether the emptiness I felt before his death made what happened afterward so much worse. Whether there was simply more room inside me for the damage to spread. As though I had spent my entire life living with some terrible internal vacancy, and when Chris died, the parts of us that had once been alive together began decomposing into all that unoccupied space. Maybe the darkness I was born carrying and the darkness his death created have become so entangled that I can no longer distinguish one from the other. I don't know how much of what I experience now belongs to the little girl who never understood why she was sad, and how much belongs to the woman who lost her brother and never found her way back to herself.

And perhaps that is why I cannot separate the grief from the love. Because the parts of me that died with Chris were not terrible things. They were beautiful things. The places where I felt understood without explanation. The instincts that told me when he was hurting. The laughter that came from a lifetime of shared memories. The extraordinary comfort of knowing there was another human being whose existence felt as natural and necessary as my own heartbeat. Those are the things that died. Not the love itself. That remains, stubbornly and painfully alive. But the living connection that gave the love somewhere to go. The part of our relationship that required both of us to exist. The shared language, the unspoken understanding, the invisible current that once traveled between us.

I remember what it felt like when those parts of me were alive. When somewhere in the world, Chris existed, and whatever invisible thread ran between us was still intact. I remember the comfort of that certainty. The strange, almost physical reassurance of knowing that someone else could feel the things I couldn't explain. That no matter how profoundly alone I felt in the world, there was another person whose existence was so deeply intertwined with mine that I was never entirely alone inside myself. I remember what it felt like to have him alive inside my life. And I know what it feels like now.

I don't know what to call the person who survived him. I only know she looks like me. She answers to my name. She remembers the life I had before. She can laugh, and love, and participate in a life that continues unfolding around her. And from the outside, there is very little evidence of what has happened beneath her skin. But I imagine what it would feel like to have an organ die inside my body without anyone removing it. To feel the tissue soften and break apart, to know that what once kept me alive was now decomposing against everything surrounding it. That the rest of my body was still supplying blood to something that could no longer be saved, and that the damage was spreading into the living tissue around it.

That is what losing Chris feels like. Not an empty space where something used to be. Not a clean wound that might eventually close. Something dead, still attached to me. Something that once functioned as naturally as my own heart, now decomposing inside a body that has no idea how to exist without it. And the rot isn't staying where it began. It has seeped into the way I love people. Into the way I experience happiness. Into the moments when nothing is wrong, but my body insists that something terrible is about to happen. It has contaminated my ability to trust that anything beautiful will remain beautiful, that anyone I love will remain alive, that something good can happen without the inevitable arrival of something devastating to take its place.

And my body is still trying to sustain it. Still sending blood to an organ that cannot use it. Every instinct that once connected me to Chris continues firing, every familiar impulse still searches for him, and all that energy has nowhere to go. The connection is dead, but the mechanisms that sustained it are still operating inside me.

Maybe that is why I am so tired. Why the sadness feels less like an emotion and more like a physical condition. Why I can sleep and still wake up exhausted. Why happiness can enter my life without ever reaching the places that hurt. Why I can be surrounded by people I love and still feel something terrible spreading beneath my ribs. I am not simply grieving someone who died eight years ago. I am living with the decomposition of something that died inside me eight years ago. There is no clean boundary between the living tissue and the dead anymore. No place where I can confidently say the damage stops. And that is the part I cannot explain to people.

The horror isn't that something inside me died when Chris did. The horror is that it stayed. That what once belonged to both of us is still inside me, actively breaking down, leaching into everything surrounding it. And the rest of me is still alive enough to feel every bit of the damage.

I was empty long before Chris died. But now I am full of something dead.

… And it is rotting inside me.