firsts

one

He was the first guy to hold my hand.

And he was the first I watched someone die with. Suicide.

The body fell rapidly onto the ground, until the body became lifeless-a corpse.

I glanced at this stranger who I had never seen before standing next to me, his hand clumsily wrapped around mine. He didn't glance back. And even if he did, his eyes would blur my face, not even recognizing if the person's hand he had been holding had actually been a person's at all. He gravely, numbly, stared on the ground the body now lied on, not moving, barely breathing.

I wondered if we should call someone, someone to notify another someone, someone to take the corpse away, and someone to weep for the body other than this stranger. But I didn't move at all, and gripped my hold around his fingers. The living needed me more than the dead. The living meant more to me than the dead.

An hour past and the circulation around my body worsened. The body was collected away. Someone was notified. The guy still didn't move. And I stood next to him until I pulled my hand away. He shook, startled, looking at me properly for the first time like he didn't even know I was there at all. He looked young and old at the same time: his grief had aged him, but his innocence of the intense emotion made him younger. Above all, he looked lost. Like his guidepost had been split into pieces like the body had been. He searched for an answer in my expression, but I had none. And if he did think that he found something from it, it wasn't from me.

I went inside of my one-room, and the guy followed me. Maybe he thought that this strange woman who had let him hold his hand for an hour wanted him to come. Inside my small room, he filled half the space. His eyes were red from crying, but he had no words to say. When I poured him tea, he didn't even notice.

So I waited. I waited for the words to come after the tears. I waited for his eventual smile after grief. And I waited for him to come. Like always.