The year Josh was preparing for the reunion prank must have been hell.
I can’t help but imagine the memories that would’ve haunted him, being back at the lodge by himself — especially in the state that he was in at the time.
Not only was it the last place he saw his sisters alive, but he and the twins grew up there — it’d been the family vacation home since the 90’s when Bob bought it.
They went missing in February, meaning the reunion took place after all of his first big anniversaries without them — his first birthday without them by his side as he blew out his candles, their first birthday not being there to be celebrated, the first Christmas he didn’t get to see Hannah get too excited for — making a huge list.
Their voices are engraved in his soul, confined deep within splitting walls of his memory like a dream he only remembers the feeling of. It’s distant, the figment, but his senses won’t allow him to escape its prominence. He’d replay his last moments with them over and over — even if he can barely remember how he had ended up on the couch that night…
Sometimes he lies there, in that very spot they had put him — If he closes his eyes, he can hear them, see the blurry visions of flickering firelight behind his sister’s familiar silhouettes, smiling down at him, so painfully close, but so far out of reach.
The memory of his sisters is warm, and somehow that contrast brought him the most grief of all. He clings back, deciding that any remnants of them are welcome. It’s not the way he should remember them, but it’s the only way he can.
He refuses to let it go, to let his sister-shaped wound to close and heal over. He refuses to let them become scars, to fade away, instead he claws the wound raw, desperately trying to keep the only part of them he still has, undying. His grief.
It’s almost masochistic, the way he grieves a memory he can’t quite grasp, pulling his own heartstrings raw until every moment he has is spent wallowing in his own self-made melancholy.
The lodge was home to a lot of storage his parents didn’t want cluttering their home in L.A. — boxes of old home videos, all of the twin’s creepy old cabbage patch dolls — the ugly little fuckers boxed away among the sibling’s many discarded trophies that his mother and father only glanced at before sending to the lodge to be piled with the rest of the family’s ‘crap’ ‘cluttering up’ their picture perfect home.
Of course, both of the twin’s rooms back in L.A. had already been cleared out and remodelled — Beth’s room now a home gym and Hannah’s a trophy room — wall mounts, rugs, the works of what you can do with the body of a dead animal.
It was like the lodge was the only place that his sister’s still existed… Although their absence almost seemed louder amongst untouched bedsheets and dust…
