Tips on Mourning

1. Keep your hands in motion like two birds, tapping, cracking knuckles, pinching fingers, pushing bits of fractured pictures round a table 'til they come together-- anything at all.

2. Forget about plans altogether and live from hug to couch to bed.

3. Find a song to sing to; do it loudly.

4. Indulge in silence and fill the fridge with beer to take the edge off.

5. Don't do dishes for a week.

6. When you feel your hand shaking when you're putting on chapstick and you thought you were okay tell yourself I am okay, I am okay.

6. Make root beer floats and when you need to Guinness floats.

7. Throw yourself against the dark damp grass outside a temple far from home and let the warmth seep from your body til it's numb and something silent draws you back to bed.

8. On the way home pick a purple tulip, almost black, and put it by your bedside.

9. Invent harnesses to hang your heavy bodies above the puzzle table so better to see the pieces and scream WE'RE NORMAL WE'RE NORMAL until the laughter roars louder than the thoughts you can't shake off.

10. Spend all your money on drop-in fees at Bikram Yoga because you need to suffer somehow; heat suffices.

11. Don't return emails, or calls, except some.

12. Cry really hard at least three times, once in the dark, curled like a flower in fetal position, and once at least in public.

13. Binge on buckets of candy and custard until you hate yourself anew.

14. Keep singing the same song, slowly, off key, half ghosts of half notes under your breath when you're walking anywhere alone.

15. When you're sick of being sad you drink until you dance madly, badly, limbs wild puppets for a terror you didn't know you had.

16. Research hypothermia on Wikipedia in class, if only to remind your classmates of the morbid lurid darkness they aren't burdened with.

17. Find someone new to melt your body into. Wish it were that easy to do away with matter.

18. Watch every video you ever took for glimpses of him living but find he's stiff and listless in the background, every time.

19. Let the dry and airless sobs exhaust themselves.

20. Get over the irony of sailing, of swimming, of darkness, of tie-dying shirts. Ty died.

21. Bicker bitterly with someone who hurt you once and use sharp words like forks to stab them as you assure yourself how little you care for their pain.

22. Be hurt.

23. Remember he was 23, almost 24.