A Day of Ghosts

I'm not sure why I'm writing this. I don't need to know actually. But my hands are writing. They're not alone. With them are my past, present and forecasted future. Past rides up front, to 18th September 1999.

I wasn't connected to anything when the phone rang. My mother's voice was shaking. "I can't find your father." In front of me was a row of benches at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I didn't hear what she said because I wasn't home in Iceland. The shake wasn't hitting nor the information.

En route to Berlin, I didn't feel anything. I was processing something behind the mirror. My thoughts weren't their usual self, trying to be for attention with plays of worries or joy. When I landed in Berlin, my brother was there to pick me up with a stranger and his son. They were buying his '83 Volkswagen. I greeted my brother with a receptive glance while the buyer spoke English with his eight-year-old son.
"I want him to be able to speak something other than German. It's for his future." The man said.

Later in the evening, my brother was sitting in the window at his little flat in Pezzalozziestrasse. He was only wearing boxers against the warm autumn rain outside. "I need you to get me two tickets to Iceland."

If anything, my brother had a talent of making a command sound like a favor, just like his blunts, "our father committed suicide, and we need to get back to Iceland tomorrow morning."

The following weeks were a blur of an undertaker, priest, crying siblings, mother, and friends. My breath wrenched around a four-dimensional knot in my stomach, squeezing out a ghost of tears.