He Started Going

This is what it is like to watch somebody die from the inside of them.

Not beside them. Inside.

You get all of it. You get the part he was hiding from me, which was most of it, because he was fifteen and I was his sister and he had decided at some point in that year that his job was to not frighten me. You get the effort that costs him. You get it failing.

I could feel him deciding what to say before he said it. I could feel him choosing the easier version. Every time.

He kept telling me he was fine.

The first hours of it I could still talk to him and he could still answer, and we had a conversation of sorts, about the village, about nothing, about a dog we had when he was small that bit everybody including the priest. He laughed once. It cost him something to do it and he did it anyway, and I felt exactly what it cost, and I let him because stopping him would have been worse.

You do not get to protect them. You know precisely what everything is costing and you cannot spend it for him.

Later he stopped answering in sentences.

Later than that he stopped answering.

People assume he was unconscious for most of it, and that is the kind version. He was there. He was there nearly the whole way. He simply could not get anything out any more, and I could feel him still in there, trying, and getting nowhere, and knowing he was getting nowhere.

He knew. The entire time. I know he knew because I was inside it with him and there is no chance whatever that I was mistaken about that.

And I knew he knew.

And he knew that too.

There was a long time in the dark where the two of us were the only people in that box who understood exactly what was happening, and neither of us could say it, and I could not lie to him because I have never been able to lie to anybody about what is in them, and he could not lie to me because I would have felt the seam.

So we did not talk about it.

He had his head in my lap by then. I do not remember arranging that. I remember it being the case.

Here is the part nobody has ever taken off me, and I have tried to give it away, and I am going to try again because there is nobody else who was in there.

I have spent my whole life being able to take pain off people.

It is what the gift was for. It is what Mi Abuela trained. A child comes to the door with his hand wrapped in his shirt and you sit down with him and you take the worst of it and he goes away lighter and forgets your name by the road, and that is correct, that is the arrangement, and I was good at it before I was nine years old.

I could not take any of it.

Not one piece. Not the smallest part of it. I sat there with my hand on his head and everything he was going through coming into me at full strength and nothing at all going the other way, and I tried the whole time, and it is not a thing you can fail at by trying wrong. There was no lever. There was never a lever. I just did not know that until it mattered.

Everybody in that village thought it was for helping. The old women crossed themselves. The healers said I was marked.

It receives. That is all it does. That is all it has ever done.

Feeling what is happening to somebody at the exact moment it is happening to them does not save them. It does not slow it down. It does not divide it in half and take my share.

It just means I was there for every second of it and could do nothing, and I have that, in full, permanently, in a way that nobody who loved him and was not in that truck will ever have to.

He went slowly.

I am not going to describe it. I could. I have it all. You do not need it and he would not have wanted it and that is the only decision I get to make about any of this.