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As I heard my mother’s voice screaming into the phone at an unsuspecting 911 operator, I remember the strange detachment inside it when she said, He’s done something to hurt himself. Her voice sounded almost lifeless, clinical in the way nurses sometimes must become in order to survive what stands before them. An emergency. A crisis. Something to stabilize.

But this was not a stranger.

This was her son.

My brother.

My geometry homework slipped from my hands onto the floor as panic seized my body before my mind could understand what was happening. I ran through the house in anguish, past the doorway where the crime scene existed, though I did not yet have language for crime scenes, for blood, for death, for the way reality can split itself open in a single second and never close properly again.

I never looked for my dog.

I never searched for the evidence of him licking my brother’s face, trying instinctively to clean the blood drying into peaks and valleys no one should ever have to imagine, let alone witness. A part of me froze permanently in that moment, melted somehow into the pink carpet beneath my feet while the rest of me fled.

Don’t look.
Just run.

Don’t look.
Just survive this.

So I ran down the street screaming for a mother who, in that moment, was no longer available to be anyone’s mother because grief had overtaken her entirely. One bullet had altered the architecture of reality itself. Childhood ended with the sound of it, though I would spend years pretending it had not.

God help me, I remember thinking.

But where was this God?

Where was this saint people promised would arrive in moments of unbearable suffering? Instead, grief tore through us like thorns splitting skin. I watched the police officer speak to my mother, who suddenly looked impossibly young, almost nineteen again, as though tragedy had stripped adulthood from her and revealed the frightened child beneath it.

The news isn’t good, my neighbor whispered.

And I fell backward onto the couch while my mother fixated somehow on a cut finger, the mind clinging desperately to details small enough to survive. She spoke about a Gamecocks t-shirt he would never wear again, never stretch across his shoulders, never laugh inside of.

Funny, the things the mind reaches for when the inevitable is approaching.

And all I could think was:

Please.

As I pressed my weight against the door, against reality itself, against the truth trying to force its way inside, my mind repeated the same impossible prayer:

Don’t let this be true.
Don’t let this become real.
Don’t let them see me.
Don’t let them see you.

And for years afterward, I lived inside that haze.

That fog.

That terrified invisibility.

Searching for freedom.
Searching for myself.

As though if I stayed hidden long enough, grief itself might forget where to find me.