Some Wounds Never Heal
People always told me, “Time heals everything.”
I believed them.
My younger brother died when I was seventeen.
He was twenty-one.
It was an accident, and honestly, even after all these years, I still don’t like explaining what happened.
For the first few months, our house didn’t feel like our house anymore.
His shoes were still near the door.
His charger was still plugged into the wall.
There was a half-used bottle of perfume on his table.
My mother couldn’t bring herself to move anything.
Neither could I.
Everyone around us kept trying to help.
“Be strong.”
“Things will get better.”
“You have to move on.”
I hated that last one.
How do you move on from someone who was part of your everyday life?
I went back to college after a few weeks.
People were kind.
But I hated the way everyone looked at me.
Like I might suddenly break.
So I stopped talking about him.
If someone asked, I said I was okay.
Eventually, I became very good at saying “I’m fine.”
Years passed.
I graduated.
Got a job.
Moved to another city.
Got married.
From the outside, everything looked normal.
Then one day, almost ten years later, I was cleaning my parents’ house and found an old notebook of his.
I sat on the floor and started reading it.
Most of it was nonsense.
Lists of things he wanted to buy.
Bad jokes.
Random song lyrics.
A list titled “Things I want to do before I’m 30.”
Visit Kashmir.
Learn guitar.
Get a dog.
Take Mom on a holiday.
Buy my sister a good phone because hers is “embarrassing.”
I laughed when I read that.
Then I cried.
Really cried.
I hadn’t cried like that in years.
But strangely, I felt lighter afterward.
That night, I told my mother about the notebook.
We sat together and talked about him for hours.
We laughed about stupid things he used to do.
For the first time, remembering him didn’t feel like something I had to avoid.
I think that’s when I understood something.
Maybe healing doesn’t mean forgetting someone.
Maybe it means being able to remember them without feeling like you’re drowning.
I still miss him.
Sometimes I’ll see someone from behind who has the same walk as him and my heart stops for a second.
Some wounds don’t completely heal.
You just learn how to live around them.
And maybe that’s okay.
