The summer after my dad died, a black wasp laid a nest of eggs in my esophagus. It wasn’t immediate, but soon those eggs began to hatch, and the vicious black bugs relocated to the pit of my stomach. I didn’t have butterflies; I had wasps. Every day, I felt them dart from side to side, colliding against the insides of my body, unfulfilled. Then, these wasps started to crawl back up my throat, filling my mouth, stinging my cheeks, and stampeding out each time my lips thought about parting.

Grief is consuming, vigorous, and consistent. It is watching a tick latch on to you, and letting it drain the life from your soul. It is only ever having two things to say, forgetting the first, and ending up only managing “I’m sorry, I can’t retain anything coming out of your mouth right now, my dad is still dead.” It is desperately seeking friendly, physical contact, but forgetting how to even touch your best friends. Sometimes, I just feel as if I don’t have what it takes to be Skyler anymore. Sometimes, there is none of her left.

Grief is ugly and misleading at times, but even in bruises and cuts and scars there is evidence that we inevitably bend towards mending and rebuilding ourselves. The scar I got when I was nine years old, from closing the skin of my knee in the window of my dad’s boat is still there, but has slowly gotten better every day of my life, and now, it wouldn’t be my leg without that mark. It might sound silly, and I’d still bring my dad back if I could, but I’ve been finding myself inescapably drawn to the beauty in the silver silk of a spider’s web.

I find myself fascinated with others who are grieving because it’s like we’re in on something of which everyone else is completely unaware. It feels like an inside joke I can even share with strangers. I’m not too shy to admit that I think my relationship with my two best friends drastically deepened after my dad died because now, we are all missing a parent. I’m a little shy to admit that I think I have better sex with the boy (not a boy, but I don’t quite consider him a man yet) who lost his dad last year because it feels more physically critical in a sexually passionate way. He probably just makes me feel the least alone because he knows what this loneliness means the most.

I have nightmares of spiders the size of my heart crawling all over my naked body. I never developed a fear of spiders, so I am often the one who’s job it is to kill them, just like my dad. But I still feel that slight rush or tinge of fear, there is a still a thrill in seeing a spider, so in these visions, I’m not necessarily scared, but my heart is racing, and they can bite me, but I’m still excited, and then, I realize I confuse my emotions. What’s the different between excitement and fear, pleasure and pain? I think they all hurt the same, one just lacks love.

I asked this boy to talk to me about death and he told me “grief is like learning to live with sadness because it’s stupid to think that life is a happy thing,” and then laughed at himself, something he does a lot. He thinks grief has made him more cynical, but he claims that he’s trying to be productive with that cynicism because his dad deserves productive children. He laughed at that, too, and so did I. He’s always been funny, but I think he’s funnier with a dead dad.

His dad’s death was heavy and lingering, and lasted about 51 weeks. My dad’s was quick and malicious; he was dead in less than 45 minutes. I’ve become a little preoccupied with the linking the two timelines, wondering about the differences between being told your dad is already dead and preparing for your dad to die for almost a year. I want to make a Venn diagram, mapping out the points where our stories overlap and where they part ways. But I’ll never be able to break through the membrane and comprehend what it took for him to be functional, what it took for him to just be there during those three hundred fifty-something, sixty-something days. I just explained the period in three different units of measurement for dramatic effect, but even in that, I still cannot fathom the time in between knowing your dad is dying and the moment you can finally call him dead.

There were plenty of bad days given that his dad was dying of cancer, but there were good days, too. Music is important to this boy, so it came as no shock when he mentioned that a lot of that time was spent exchanging songs with and playing his guitar for his dad. He cites “Hearts and Bones” by Paul Simon, and I’m afraid to listen to it because I know I’ll cry. He boasts about being the musical one in his family, but I bet that pride comes most from his dad’s admiration for his talent. He would play his favorite songs, then his dad would feebly jot down a note, hinting at what he wanted to hear next. His dad wasn’t getting any better and couldn’t really talk, so note taking became a new, almost fun way of communication. While his dad’s physical body was succumbing to his disease, his mind remained coherent and unscathed. My heart aches thinking of the frustration from knowing exactly what you want to say, but struggling so deeply to convey it to those who need to hear it most. It’s like those painful dreams in which you try scream as hard as you can, but nothing comes out. I think my head would have exploded.

He told me that one day, his dad wrote “keef” on a piece of paper. His older brother assumed he meant weed, which would be the logical assumption considering the pain and nausea from chemo, but I think this boy knew dad a little better than the rest of his siblings. It’s truly memorizing hearing him tell this story because you can literally see the joy grow in his face when he mentions that he knew to play the Rolling Stones because “keef” was in fact the written representation of Keith Richards saying his own name in his British accent. Sometimes, I force myself to sit down and recall all the little, less important memories to remind myself just how much of my best friend my dad was, but there something more potent and tangible about the look in this boy’s eyes that brought me closer to satisfying this sad craving in the pit of my heart.

We both still have our dad’s phone numbers in our phones. I don’t know what the significance of that is, but now I’m wondering what’s it going to take for me to delete it. I never called it after he died, and my mom cancelled the number by now, but the boy’s mom hasn’t. He told me that he calls it sometimes, but the voice message is always deeply disappointing for him. Maybe deleting your dead loved one’s cell phone number from your contacts is a step in the direction of the stage of grief in which you start to recognize and put up with the feeling that there is part of your life that now only exists in your head.

My dad died 357 miles away from me. The last time I saw him, he and my mom were helping me move out of my freshman dorm. I know the actual last time was when our cars parted ways, and I drove to DC and he drove to my uncles in Mystic, Connecticut, but the most concrete image I have is of the two of us in my empty room in my dorm, Clark. I had just gotten a pair of platform shoes, right when they started making their comeback, and he just thought they looked so stupid. He was sitting on my desk chair with a box in his lap, making fun of me, while I sat across from him on my bare mattress, giving him some back sass about his sweat pants and button down. This is us at our core; this is a scene that has happened so many times before that I know I will never not remember it. It is tattooed all over my body, inside and out.

I wonder if I’ll ever find someone who loves me as much as my dad did.

My dad was always the fun parent. My memories of him consist of him throwing snowballs at me indoors, randomly challenging me to races down the hallways of hotels, and buying a yellow jeep just because I said to one day when I was a kid. I keep my dad here, locked in these fast, light moments, in the back of my head. I know I never actually get to relive those scenes, but one of the beautiful or fucked up ways I think about this is that even though I’ll have to listen to my friends complain about their asshole fathers for not giving them enough money or letting them move in with their boyfriend, I’ll never get in to another fight with my dad. I’ll never hear him yell at me in disappointment again, nor will I ever have to be angry with him. Instead, I get to visit him in my empty room in Clark where we will stay, laughing.

This boy who lost his dad has many final memories because his death didn’t really happen in one moment. Sure, the actual dying part did, but when you die for a year, I bet to them both, it felt like he died on several different occasions. He told me the story of their last real talk, and it is simple and short and sweet. His dad told him “no one escapes this”. He told his dad “I’m just sorry it’s happening so soon”. His dad replied, “I’m sorry, too”. He then took his father’s hand, because he was too weak to move it himself, and placed it on his own head that was resting on the bed. He made a point to tell me that he didn’t cry because he wanted to hold it together for his dad, though I don’t think his dad was the one he was holding it together for. He told me it was eerie for him because his dad was so depleted and cold, but they just stayed there like that because it was all that really could be done in the moment. I think that’s a fucking beautiful and true representation of the strength this boy showed for his dad. I wanted to freeze them there, but then the boy broke our silence by adding that his father also told him to make sure his older brother finds a girlfriend. I think this boy can’t be serious, but humor is admittedly a very realistic coping mechanism.

He doesn’t show his weakness, and if he does, it’s in a joke. But I’ve felt it a few times, especially when he said to me, “I wish my dad were still alive.” He laughed afterwards, but you could hear something forming in his throat, something substantial. I want to swallow his sadness. Maybe because I think he doesn’t deserve this more or maybe I just want a monopoly on pain, so I can be rich in something heavier and more potent. Maybe I seek solace in death. But I want to bring his dad back. I want to bring everyone’s dad back.

Then we share moments when I realize that our grief is in different languages; some words overlap, but death has produced different things in us. I guess I’m just angry or jealous that he could seem more okay that I do. He seems more adjusted to the circumstances, he seems more on his feet. It’s been almost three years and though I’ve picked myself up, everyone still feels like a stranger to me. Death has created this deep, one-sided distance between me and every single person I love, and I can’t explain it to them because my words sting. How do I admit that I’ve forgotten how to be close to anyone? How do I admit that I’d rather be alone?

But when I’m drunk and he’s in my bed, he serves as my best friend. He doesn’t know it, but there is something about lying next to him at that hour of the night that bridges the gap, and I finally feel sane for a few hours. Apparently, I often spill my heart out to him when I am drunk, and I didn’t tell him, but it’s because inebriated Sky believes that he can fix her. I’m holding on to him as some sort of proof that I’m going to be okay, as if he’s the assurance I need to convince myself that I’m going to figure this out, like he did.

The image I keep coming back to, the frame in which I have put him and his dad, is the only time that this boy claimed to have cried. He didn’t give me any back story, didn’t really set a scene, he just said one night he listened to “Hearts and Bones” while his dad slept next to him, and cried. No crazy catalyst nor grand instigator, the same song just happened to do something different.

I haven’t talked to this boy about his dad too many times, but out of the times that I have, he has told me that he accepted his dad was going to die from the day he found out he was sick. He told me there was a time right before his dad passed that everyone else was hopeful, but he was not. In age, he is the baby of the family, yet he serves as this quasi-patriarchal weight that stays grounded in the unfortunate reality, so I find this moment of release so striking. It’s a bittersweet moment of realization and acceptance; it’s the silver lining of an ugly caterpillar’s cocoon, that inevitable growth in to something that is bigger and more beautiful and can fly.

I wish I could have placed my dad’s hand on my head one last time before he died, but instead, I was too scared to look at his dead body at the funeral home. Our last effort in making physical contact was reaching our hands out the windows of our separate cars, attempting to hold on to one another for just a second, but we were too far away, and I was impatient. In my head, my dad is somewhere unknown, still reaching out his hand for me, but I’m never going to be there.

Maybe the difference is that while my brain understands, my heart doesn’t know that my dad is dead, just that he’s gone. I never felt his heart stop. I never saw him fall to the ground at the bathroom sink and I never saw the fear in my mom’s eyes, so there is a part of me that will never be convinced. I crave the stories of others, so I can fill in the missing parts to my story that is the demise of my dad. Or maybe this is now the only way I can connect with others, with the boy.

I watched Uptown Girls this past weekend, and something I have started to realize is that children’s movies are often fundamentally clogged with grief, but I didn’t see it when I was younger because I didn’t believe in death yet. When 8-year old Ray loses her father, she takes the subway to Coney Island, rides the teacups until she vomits, then punches her babysitter in the gut until it turns in to a hug. I cannot wait to move to New York and go to Coney Island to do the same.

I am learning how to make the most of grief, to determine how grief has made me a better person because my dad deserves that. He would die if he knew I were unhappy, and dying once is already enough. I try not to push people away, my words no longer come out in the form of venom, and I don’t have any more wasps stinging the flesh of my stomach, but there is always this one single gnat, flying right around my neck, giving off such a faint, yet constant buzz, reminding me that soon, it will be time to delete my dad’s number from my phone.