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I don't spot him on the outside as much anymore. He's not in the figure one block up that almost has his stride or in the beat-up car on the other side of an intersection. I don't have to resist my desire to speak to strangers who might have that same dark wave in their hair or the identical beat up levis. And he doesn't seem to tap me on the shoulder or whisper in my ear, doesn't push me up from underneath or crush me with a wickedly brilliant thought. It would be difficult for me to tell you exactly what he smells like, or where my head would fit on his shoulder on the rare occasion we hugged. Those sharp edges have blurred the way everything does as it ages.

When they tell you that the hurt will ease with time - that's what they mean. If of course, they're lucky enough to still believe that shit, lucky enough not to know better.

But those are not the missing pieces that will hurt the most, anyway. You think so at first, oh fuck do you ever. At first, it's all you can manage, to cower from the heart splitting beams of light that blast you with every detail that points to their absence. At the same time you're peaking through the gaps between your fingers because you have to know, and because like any two year old can tell you, when you close your eyes you're not there anymore. Peering out that way, you let them keep talking as they describe how meticulous he was, to protect the note with a zip lock bag, how thoughtful he was to apologize for the mess right in the note, for the sight he must have been to whoever found him, because you can't possibly believe it otherwise.

I suppose I didn't believe it and that's why I still looked for him for so long. Still thought maybe it was a joke. A very bad joke, of course but a hoax nevertheless. Thought maybe if he couldn't take it anymore, if everything he said in one of the drafts of another longer typed letter we found in his house was true that maybe he might have just gone away somewhere else. That maybe he could be the man in the faded jeans walking up ahead or driving the twenty year old car across from me in the intersection. Still there, still a possibility of something, just making a different left hand turn.

He's not of course. There is no maybe in suicide, no take backs and no way to correct the mistake. No way to even know that it was a mistake. Not if you do it right, and If anyone could tell you the right way to do something it was my dad.

Nope. He's not on the outside very often anymore, but I find him. He's in the late-night laugh fests I have with my sister, in the bullshitting we share. He's the flirty glint in my brother's eyes and the beer he throws down his throat without swallowing. He's the anti-authority stubborn streak in my daughter and the angry brow on my son.

And I find him in me. In my words. In my silence. In the ache.

When I was a kid I felt the pressure of his hope crushing me, his expectations, his anger and loathing when I didn't measure up, every time I threw it all away. I know now that hate was for himself. You don't get to take that when you go. It doesn't shatter and fly out to the outside. It stays in. On the inside of the pieces of yourself you leave behind.