carsyn bowers [d8; cbd1]

An identity forgotten; an identity gained.

Loss so common I’ve buried myself in my cousin’s ground— hell, six feet under is no longer a challenge, simply a secondary state of mind.

My mother says that grieving is a process, that the time it takes to heal sometimes outlasts the time one can spend dwelling in it, but I’ve proved both theories wrong and I’ve only spent seventeen years trying.

I suppose I define myself as an overachiever.

This family has lived in the walls this factory has built; there is nothing processed that we do not see as product, everything here manufactured, put together piece-by-piece and able to be torn apart in the same manner.

Instructions given and followed, my cousin did not know anything that was not written down in black and white, left to his mind there was no variation. Noah saw this life as linear, started on the day existence could be defined and ended on the day where he lost the ability to do so.

I see this time as variant, fluctuating in the seconds spent to define what has right of passage. I will not reach the end of his timeline simply because I have denied it; I did not go to his funeral for this reason.

Denial of a cousin dead, his gravestone lingers in our backyard like the family’s identity remembered.

I spent the time of his eulogy ripping my identity apart; stripping myself of anything bowers and replacing it with watching the sky fall.

This kingdom they built has crumbled; the throne is made of tombstones.

I tell my mother that their existences lingered with a taste of pointless on my tongue, she says, “No, they were martyrs.”

I tell her that this is not a religion I can follow.