March is coming.
It has become my least favorite month. Even thinking about it I feel a little sick. My muscles are tense. I am like a tightly coiled spring. 

The last two March’s, someone died. Both of them young men, one 17 and the other 24.

March 21, 2012 was the first time I experienced death. I remember exactly where I was sitting. I remember the phone calls. For weeks, my brain was full of white noise. My thinking was slowed. My chest was tight. Nothing felt real.

March 23, 2013 saw another death. I didn’t sleep for weeks. Everything seemed gray, distant, and hollow. I waited for April with tight fists, gritted teeth, and shallow breathing.

Death is strange. Grieving is stranger.
It’s not like I’ll think about it any more in March. A day hasn’t gone by in the last two years that I haven’t thought of it.

Sometimes I feel heavily the weight of their nonexistence. All that remains of them are memories, and objects left behind which are not them at all, but things they touched. Little reminders of their past interactions with the world I still occupy.

Other times I feel them strongly. It’s as if their soul was dissolved into billions of ethereal particles pushing through time and space, in which I am still trapped. They cluster and hover and jostle me, forcing me to remember tiny details from when we existed in the same way. They reach me from an endless oblivion to remind me of times shared, of words exchanged, of their unique imprint on my life.
In those moments, they seem not so dead.

March is coming.
It has become my least favorite month.