February

            There was a day that I spent entirely in bed, sweating, shaking and vomiting into a plastic container that I kept beside me on the floor. I had gotten so drunk the night before that I can’t even remember now what I was doing. I didn’t eat the entire day, and my body still tried to throw up nothing.
            The next morning I felt good. It was the end of February and it was finally sunny. My mother and I drove to a grocery store and when I got out of the car in the parking lot I noticed that I didn’t need my jacket anymore. I liked the cool air against my skin and the feeling of nothing inside of me. My body felt at ease, as if the day before I had thrown up all of my problems.
            Being in the grocery store reminded me that I should be eating something, but all I really wanted was coffee, so I bought one from the self-serve coffee stand and pushed the cart around, leaning on the plastic bar. My mother and I went to the floral section of the grocery store to buy a bouquet of flowers for my brother. I saw a bunch of daisies that had been dyed blue and thought about the song he liked called blue flowers. I insisted that those were the ones we had to get for him.
            In the parking lot, I sat in the passenger seat with the flowers on my lap. I noticed that the price tag was still on the cellophane wrapping, so I started to peel it off. I asked myself why I was doing it, but kept trying to peel the paper off anyway.
            “Will it come off?” my mother asked.
            She took the flowers from my lap and tried to peel the sticker off herself, managing to get most of the paper off so that the price was at least gone. It was good enough. Neither of us said anything to each other about it. We both looked straight ahead in our seats as she drove quietly through the parking lot and onto the road.
            At the cemetery, the snow was wet and deep. I found it difficult to walk to his headstone, but didn’t mind. I took the flowers out of the plastic wrap and put them into the snow in front of the gravestone. They covered his name. My mom said, “Do you ever feel like he’s here when we’re talking to him?” I looked around at the other headstones, the long and winded paths, the section of trees in the distance where sometimes I see empty caskets and deer. I said I didn’t know. I couldn’t believe he was here either. I wish I could have told her that he wasn’t. She said, “I feel like he’s back at the house saying, ‘Hey guys, I’m over here. There’s no way I’m hanging out there with all those old people,’” and she laughed her adorable little laugh. I laughed too, but then I remembered that the grave next to his was of a young boy, even younger than my brother. There was a portrait of him in his hockey gear on the grave, the kind you would normally see on a hockey card.
            She touched the top of the gravestone and told him that she missed him and that she loved him, wiping the snow off with her bare hand, as if she was wiping the lint off the shoulder of his sweater.

Sara Jane Strickland is a fourth year Film Studies and Creative Writing student.