Your Unwasted Summer

We watched the trees' shadows run from West to East
across the too-green, too-well trimmed lawn.
Trapped inside the air-conditioning,
wondering why rehab centers always have names that try to
hide the fact that they are rehab centers,
I would wait. I'd wait for you to
emerge triumphant from your room. Meal times
forced you out. But then your butterfly manners
and listening heart made us all
hate your fucking MCAT prep-book.
I used to imagine that, when you closed
your plain wooden door named “3”
you didn't open the book to study at all. You just kept
trying to lift the weight of it.
It would be placed firmly on the floor, and
you would bend down like a baseball catcher,
grasp the edges, and, in complete futility, heave
like everyone who pulled before Arthur,
as though God had reached down into Middle America with both hands,
grabbing you under each armpit with his enormous thumbs
and forefingers, pulling behind you as you strained in vain.
You'd try to get it up off the floor for two or three hundred hours
I mean minutes,
raise yourself up, wipe the sweat from your brow,
shrug, put it on the desk and come out
just in time for dinner.
I transparently feigned a hatred for MSU
just to keep you out of your cave and smiling for a bit longer.
But you would always retreat eventually, leaving me alone to stare down
the sterilized motivational posters, plastered against
the noxious baby blue wall paper, all illuminated by
the horrible buzzing fluorescent lights—underneath which
we used to drink the shitty, instant, decaf coffee from paper cups.
It was beautifully cliché, and I'm sure that was the point.
But you were a great rock, and you let it all
wash over you and recede like harmless surf.
And you were also the antirock, because
your smile leveled mountains,
then built them up inside of me;
you gave me weight.
I am a Giant Redwood,
and you chopped me down and made me look at my roots to
count all the powerful layers that make up my being.
You cleared out all my dead wood. You burnt down
everything that stole my chemistry. You buckled my seatbelt,
and told me everything would be OK, and I could be as big.
Then it killed you.
Not a death of allegory, but the kind with
autopsies and paperwork, prepackaged,
“we're so sorry your ____ is dead” Hallmark cards,
and endless reassurance that
“there was nothing more anyone could do,”
all set in motion by a series of
trembling phone calls to next of kin
that unravel out into a dream-catcher of grief,
crisscrossing the whole country.
All that's left now is a gravestone that
shouts in granite,
'we couldn't save you.'
Looking back, it feels like
I survived a car wreck in
six months of slow motion.
But I was in a different city,
so I didn't have to watch you be
jettisoned through the windshield
while my seatbelt engaged