I awoke with a hangover. Not from the liquor, I barely had any, from the fog. 

I blame the fog and the thoughts on my inability to hold conversation or roll a proper cigarette last night, not a sip of arabic coffee mixed with liquor. 

“It reminds me of this funeral I went to in highschool,” I tell the liquor giver. He looks at me like I’ve lost it. I had said something inappropriate for a party. I blame the fog for my inability to hold a conversation. 

I remember the morning of the funeral we; my mother, my sister, and I went shopping at Goodwill for clothes. I needed a loose long sleeved top and pants. I still have the black dress pants in my closet, folded and hung on a hanger.

I remember the inside of the Mosque. How it felt sitting in the almost silence, eating the dried figs, drinking the arabic coffee from the waxed dixie cups in the circle of folding chairs set up for the women. It was an echoing silence, that similar to a gymnasium, you could hear the sobs and chairs being pushed out. I sat next to the girls from my grade. He was a boy, and the boys sat silently in another circle of the same folding chairs on the other side of the room. We had walked through separate doors to enter. The circles were separated by the doors and tables of homaged food.

I remember the feeling of hugging his mother, who was closer to my mother than I was to him. She hugged the way the mother I live across the street whose orchids I water hugs. I remember feeling guilty that she trusted her sadness in my hands. Someone who couldn’t have told you her son’s football number before the passing. I remember wishing then that there was a way that with this trust put upon me— that with it came the ability to take that, her sadness, away. 

I remember being told that they would bury him in a white cloth. I always imagined it to be made of silk, to look similar to that of a scarf I own except without the living stains.  I don’t know the reason beyond this, but I thought it was beautiful to not be boxed in. That the soul would be given the chance to breathe.