Writing Exercise- Line by Line: The Last Time I Saw...

Each week I get a prompt and write a short blurb on it, just to write something. This week's prompt is 'The Last Time I Saw'.

I still remember the last time I saw him. He was taller than I, which surprised me, because he's so much younger. He had light brown skin, the color of rich coffee with a lot of cream in it, the kind that makes people ask "so do you like a little cream with your coffee?" His big, brown eyes, framed by lush, full lashes that curled up-- lashes I envied daily. Boys don't need lashes like that. You don't even have to do anything to them, they just... are. Those eyes would dart about the room from person to person, depending on where the action was.

He usually was wearing a pair of jeans much too big and too baggy, over a pair of shorts and then a pair of boxers. For reasons I will never understand. He would layer even in the summer, just because. He always had a nice polo or button down shirt on, and a t-shirt underneath. A gold chain that sat in the dip of his neck, on his now manly post pubescent chest. Sometimes an earring, but mom didn't like them, so the last time I saw I him, he didn't have an earring in. He always had a short cut, with a wicked fade, or he'd braid his hair -- long, thick, black cornrows from front to back.

I remember his laugh. It was more of a giggle. I never knew a man could giggle, but he did. He would laugh loud and long, always exuberant, joyful, playful. The last time I saw him, we joked with one another and he kept me laughing hysterically over some such thing. I can't even remember. It was probably stupid. He was very silly.

You know.

 

I'm lying. To myself.

 

Because that wasn't the last time I saw him.

The last time I saw him was the day of his funeral. That young, lithe, 22 year old body sitting inside a box, that coffee-with-too-much-cream-skin taking on a pale pallor, kind of fuzzy, when I touched him. He had a nice dapper haircut, with a wicked fade. Jeans too big, Ralph Lauren Polo that our brother picked out for him to wear, and the slightest peach fuzz growing on his lip. I would have ridiculed the peach fuzz. He was too young for a moustache. In my mind, sometimes, he's still 14. Eyes closed, those thick,  lush lashes laying against his face.

I don't want to remember that last time I saw him. Instead, I remember him singing his own version of popular songs, overemphasizing them in the way only he could or would do it. Watching TV shows together and arguing plot and whether or not it was stupid. Driving him and Jonathon around while they told each other, for hours, to 'shut up. No, you shut up. I told you to shut up. You shut up'.  The way he walked about the house in slippers--stomp, slap,stomp, slap--could hear him coming from anywhere. His sing song voice when he wanted something from you and how much he would suck up to you to get it.  And how he smelled of Chrome cologne and Ivory soap and how he was and always will be the baby.

 

And how his son looks exactly like him. And has his personality. And is such a gift to us, now that he's gone.

That's how I want to remember The last time I saw him.