Heavy Things

I went to a Modest Mouse show in Brooklyn last night. Kyle hated Modest Mouse. There's this one single, Float On, that you've probably heard because they can't play it enough on the radio. Once, when I was home for Christmas in '05, Kyle and I were driving through Eagle Rock and it came on. I turned it up. Kyle turned it off. He was heavy into reggae by then and considered the number of white bands on my iPod to be a sign of my lack of musical maturity. I turned the radio back on. Kyle turned it off again. I screamed at him. He called me a whiny bitch. It went on like this until the song ended. After that, every time I sang along to Float On, even back in New York, I thought of Kyle and how ashamed he would be if only he knew what I was listening to.

The venue last night was outside in this massive 7000 person 1930s swimming pool. The sky was wide above and the night was thick and sticky. Towards the end of the set, the drum beat to Float On started and a breeze picked up. The crowd cheered - it had been waiting for this - the melody started, and I thought of Kyle reaching for the radio dial with his spider fingers. "You can't listen to this pop shit, Mir. This is really bad."

There's this line in Float On that I've always loved:
Don't worry
Even if things end up a bit too heavy
We'll all float on all right.

Last night, I looked up into the gray bowl of the sky and saw that it was empty. It didn't hold my brother's body or soul or the promise of seeing him again. He wasn't up there, smiling down and shaking his big ol' head as I danced in a crowd of white people. He wasn't anywhere at all. That realization was like a great weight on my neck. My brother was dead and buried and the only place he was anymore was with me. On me. Like he was suddenly sitting on my shoulders, his legs hanging to the ground, his fingers wrapped around my forehead, and he was never going to let me put him down.

I smiled then. I felt slow, and lonely, and heavy, but I smiled because even dragged down like that, I was okay. Dragged down like that, my mother was going to be okay. My father was going to be okay. Things had ended up entirely too heavy, we had to carry Kyle with us now, but somehow we were still standing. It was a shock - who knew we could hold that much weight? - but it was also encouraging. If we could still stand, we could still walk. And if we could still walk, someday we might be able to float.