How To Measure Grief

7:23am

The time that morning that your brother walked into your room because your alarm wouldn’t stop going off, and he was going to yell at you because it was Saturday, but when you didn’t answer and he walked over to hit snooze, your eyes were open but you weren’t awake and he thought and told me later, who kills themselves on a Friday night?

19 days

What day after your death that you mother forced herself out of bed and stood at the bathroom mirror with her toothbrush in hand and realized that it was never going to get easier, that it was going to feel like this forever, and that it was only a matter of time until the day she wouldn’t get out of bed just like you hadn’t.

5min

Exactly how far into Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah that he sings the words, “Well maybe there’s a god above/ but all I’ve ever learn from love/ was how to shoot somebody outdrew you.”

30B.C.

The year Cleopatra committed suicide by asp bite, preferring this solution to the humiliation of allowing the Romans to triumph.

10in.

How many inches you cut off of your hair the day after the big fight when you wouldn’t call me for three days, but instead drove all the way downtown to that salon you read about in the paper and sat in the black vinyl chair and waited until the stylist pressed the pedal with her foot and rose you up to say to her, “Please get rid of it all.”

200mg

16 times the recommended dose of Zolpidem that the coroner found in your bloodstream on a beautiful spring Saturday afternoon when he would rather have been at his son’s Little League game and your parents would have rather been able to pretend that it was all just one big accident.

3C

Your locker number, that became my locker number, that was our locker number, until you asked me to move my books out of it and I did, but because you never changed the combination on the lock, occasionally I would leave something there for you to find, a crumpled piece of paper maybe, but never with anything written on it.

4EVR

What you carved in to the bench outside of the ice skating rink the first time I kissed you, on the cold ice under the flashing disco ball during couple’s skate, even though later you would swear that it didn’t count, and that we didn’t really love each other back then because it was only eighth grade and you only skated with me that night because you didn’t want to be the girl waiting alone in line at the concession stand for a hot pretzel.

32A

The numbers printed on the tag of your bra that would tickle my thumb as I slid my hand up and along the pale smooth skin of your back as the vertebrae of your spine gently whispered me along.