come wrestle me free / the funeral. ( flashback )
Marlene nearly didn’t go.
There were a lot of reasons not to. For one, watching her little brother be put into a hole in the ground, never to rise from, sounded like a new kind of torture to Marlene. For another, she didn’t want to deal with everyone. She’d been avoiding home as much as possible, as well, because it just felt so empty, filled with ghosts, and the reception was meant to be there. There were plenty of reasons why she shouldn’t go.
In the end, she did, and for the only reason that mattered: Matty. She wanted to be able to do it for him. She knew he wouldn’t hold it against her or anything if she couldn’t, but it would feel like losing him again—like letting the people who took him away from her win—if she couldn’t get through it. And so she went.
She didn’t listen much. Or, well, she did, but only to notice that whilst everything people were saying was true—he was gone too soon he was good and kind and gentle and loving—it wasn’t her Matty. But nobody likes to talk about laughter at a funeral, she supposed, and immediately wanted to throw up. It was his fucking funeral. Nothing made sense, and it felt like the world was spinning.
Eventually, the service ended. She almost didn’t notice, except everyone stood up and slowly started heading off on their way to her house, where they were meant to have some kind of reception—given that receptions were meant to receive things, and Matty had been taken from them, it seemed cruelly ironic, but nobody had asked her.
She finally stood, and started walking. Well. ‘Walking’ generally indicated purpose. It was more that her feet were moving slowly, and taking her with them. She felt numb all over, and she couldn’t think of anywhere she wanted to go less than her house, where it was usually absolutely inescapable what had happened, when she felt like she was haunted by Matthew every time she stepped inside, because the absence of him was so jarring—and with a crowd of people who wanted to trade platitudes about her brother, as if he was something two-dimensional, something that could be summed up by good intentions and well-meaning words alone, something less than the living, bright-eyed, grinning human with the strong beating heart that had been so permanent so recently? Nothing in her wanted that.
