It is Tuesday, which means I will be working from home. Daylight hits my eyes through a crack in the curtains. I get up, splash water on my face, and move to the kitchen. Finn, my stepson, is making a bagel. The smell of the toaster is in the air. I pour water into the kettle and wait for it to heat. When it is ready, I fill my cup and drop in two tea bags. The morning has the texture of every other morning. Bethanie, my wife, is teaching an online class somewhere in the house. I carry my tea to the loveseat in the living room and pull out my phone.

My mother has texted about a cone collar for Juniper, my sister’s cat, who had surgery yesterday to remove a hair tie from her intestine. I make a mental note to drop the cone off for Juni later. Then I see my brother Alex’s name.

I go still.

It has been more than a year since his name appeared on my phone with a call or message. Every attempt to contact him only met with silence. The last time we had any real back and forth, anything resembling ease between us, was almost five years ago. I went to his house once and he said through the closed door that he didn’t want a confrontation. I stood on his porch and felt the word land wrong and drove home with it.

But his name is on my phone, and I open the message.

He has sent me a link to a YouTube video. Alan Watts. In the End. Watch it sometime. And then: I didn’t forget about you.

I read it again. I didn’t forget about you.

Something loosens in my chest. Something I had been holding without knowing I was holding it. Alex reached out. He thought of me, and he reached out and there is his name on my phone and the words are right there. I let myself feel it, the warmth, the hint of ease, the possibility. Maybe this is the thing that opens a door. Maybe this is how it starts, a link to a video, a small gesture across the distance, and then something more. I sit with it. The morning is quiet and Finn is making a bagel and Bethanie is teaching a class and my brother has not forgotten me.

Then my phone rings.

It is my mother.

I pick up and say hello and her voice is wrong. I have heard it before, that register of anguish, in the years when my father was still in the picture and she cried about things he had done. I haven’t heard it in decades. I know immediately that something is deeply wrong. And then she says it.

“Alex is gone.”

I hear the sounds. I know they are words. I say, “What,” and I mean it, I genuinely mean it. I am asking her to tell me what the sounds mean. Alex is gone. I turn the words over. Alex. Gone. My brother’s name and a word that means away, means absent, means not here, and I am still holding the ease from thirty seconds ago, am still inside the loosened feeling, still in the morning that has the texture of every other morning.

“Gone where?”

She says, “Get over here now. Now!” And her voice breaks on the second now and something in me understands and my body stands up from the loveseat before my mind has agreed to anything. I am moving. I am asking what happened and she says he shot himself and I hear it and I hear it and I hear it and still the meaning does not crack open.

I am moving through the house. I pass Finn in the hallway and he asks what’s happening and I gasp, “My brother.” Just that, my brother, because they are the only words I have. I am calling for Bethanie. I am searching for her and the words come out of me, “He shot himself,” and she says, “Don’t drive,” and I don’t, I let her. I am in the passenger seat, and we are moving, too slowly, and I am trying to breathe.

But I am also still back there. Some part of me is still on the loveseat with the phone in my hand and his name on the screen. I didn’t forget about you. The words are still there in the way that words stay, the warmth still present the way heat rises from a cup of tea left sitting. I am in the car and we are on the freeway and I am heaving air in a way I have never done before, like I have forgotten how, and still some part of me is reading his text for the first time and feeling the loosening and not knowing yet what it cost him to send it, not knowing yet what it meant that he sent it that morning, not knowing what I was receiving when I let myself feel the warmth of it and thought maybe this is how it starts.

My sister calls. I tell her and she screams, “What,” just as I did, the same word, and I know exactly where she is, I know the place she is standing right now where only the sounds have arrived, and I cannot tell her what is waiting on the other side of the word because I am not there yet myself, I am still in the gap, still in the place between gone and what gone means, still grasping the warmth from his message like a wisp of steam.

We pull up to his house. A police officer is arriving at the same moment. I am out on the road before Bethanie has fully stopped her car and my mother is coming out of the wooded area across the street, moving toward the officer, and I run to her and hold her and then I look to my right.

He is lying flat near a large tree.

And there it is, cracking open. Not with a sound, or a word, not with anything my mother said or my sister screamed but because I can see him, because he is there and he is not there, because his body is on the ground in the dirt near a large tree and the morning that had the texture of every other morning is gone now too, simply gone. I am standing in what is left, with my mother in shock and my sister sobbing and the warmth from his text still lingering in the air.

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson