Everyone says you never know until it happens to you. As if\nonce it happens to you, a lightbulb goes off, shedding light on all the dark\ncorners, on all the unanswered questions you had before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As if until you lose a leg, you\nnever know how life will go on from that moment onwards. But for those who do,\nyou see them somehow still alive and so it becomes a secret only they have.\nLike a secret treasure-of-a-consolation prize they get to keep to themselves\nwhile others just wonder \u201chow do they do it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I thought that whenever I heard\nabout a tragic death. Let me be clear; anyone\u2019s death is saddening. But some\nare more tragic than others. You see someone\u2019s forty year old father suddenly\nnever wake up from his sleep, and you wonder how they\u2019ll ever move on.\nSomeone\u2019s sister gets hit my drunk driver. Someone\u2019s mother gets cancer.\nSomeone\u2019s brother, someone\u2019s best friend. And yet you see them living their\nlife, somehow having figured it out. They have a secret they don\u2019t let the rest\nof us in on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When my brother passed away two\nmonths ago, I thought I would be finally be let in. I thought something\ntransforms you on the inside, you go through a radical journey, and you come\nout a new person on the other end, somehow still alive and breathing and\nsmiling. From the moment I heard of my brother\u2019s hanging, I thought about this.\nI waited for the lightbulb, for a signal or for some divine intervention that\nwould guide me and tell me what to do next. But nothing came. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody told me there\u2019s no\nsecret. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the first week, every\nmorning when I would open my eyes, I would remember my brother\u2019s body lying\ncold in the funeral home. And I would wet my pillow enough for it to be the\nfirst wash of the day every day. I thought that maybe I don\u2019t know what to do\nyet, how to move on from here yet, because I am still in shock. So I waited\nsome more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I waited till after his\nfuneral. Till after his burial. Till after his memorial. Till a whole month\nsomehow passed, and yet I was still peeking into his room on my way downstairs\nevery single day, waiting for him to pop into my visual, smoking a joint,\nasking me to join him. But the room just sighed back as I walked past it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few days later I met an old\nschool friend who had also lost his sister in an untimely accident a few years\nago. That was another tragedy. We were in middle school, and even then my\nprepubescent-self had looked up at my friend that day in awe and thought, \u201cLook\nat him. How is he standing up right? How is he so stoic? Surely he must know\nsomething we don\u2019t.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And now here we are, years and tragedies later, looking at each other as if we both are a part of a pathetic club, and we both pity each other\u2019s inadvertent membership. I looked past his sincere smile and saw the hollowness that weighed him down. He knew nothing. Nobody had told him either. He was just here, figuring it out. So was I. There we stood together in silence, hollow, but alive and breathing and smiling at each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
An Ode to the Galaxy of Smoke is a collection of (unpublished) poems I wrote in honour of my late brother who died of suicide last year. Although I have been expressing myself via writing for over 17 years, my style and connection to it has only strengthened over the past year. Poetry and prose have both been my aids in every journey I have ever been on, and this submission reflects the roles they play in my life, through three different pieces. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Editor’s note: Two poems from ‘Ode to the Galaxy of Smoke’ were published on December 13.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everyone says you never know until it happens to you. As if once it happens to you, a lightbulb goes off, shedding light on all the dark corners, on all the unanswered questions you had before. As if until you lose a leg, you never know how life will go on from that moment onwards. … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative-non-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-sw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1768"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1770,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768\/revisions\/1770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}