Landon’s Seasons

When Landon died, Dad urged me to hold on to the Good.
My hard-drive of Landon memories is a muddled MacBook, tab-happy browsing in multiple windows, fifty applications opened but unresponsive, folders littered on a chaotic iCloud. 
The Good is encrypted somewhere on that desktop.

The only way I can grasp the Good of my brother as a whole is in segmented characters.
Because loving a sick someone isn’t accepting the repetitive forecast from Seattle’s meteorologist. 
Loving someone who is unpredictably unwell is being willing to ride a seasonal mania.
A Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter that flip off the calendar and forward their moody march.
Loving Landon felt like that.

[fall]
Landon brooded.
His trunk seemed to shed musings onto paper or musical strings, assuring us of renewal coming.
Here, he felt the weight of lush-less decay.
We’d watch him darken and glow like a jack-o-latern, raking in the mulched disorder from the competing voices in his head.
But he was cinnamon to conversation, salting us with questions and tender curiosities.

[winter]
Landon paralyzed.
Here, icicle brown eyes refused to meet yours, so I’d bury my nose into a turtleneck of detachment.
Contact on ice, sweet efforts of eggnogged engaging and hot cocoad conversing were shoved away.
Words came in monotoned, fat flurries, a frost that’d bite toes and blanket windshields.
The most we could do was layer up and wait out his hibernation.

[spring]
Landon stung.
Here, he shook to life legs, fingers and cruel words that had fallen asleep.
But once thawed, he was a puddle. 
Argument hours bring apology showers, ladling me spoonfuls of soggy sorry’s at my bedroom door.
Any budding lunacy leisurely chirped.
Landon was under a spell, making lawn angels on green carpets.
He was soft and steady, and you’d completely forget about the incoming madness.

[summer]
Landon simmered.
Heat waves of unforgiving, humid dew of Landon doing the don’ts and defacing the dos.
Here, everything about him felt anarchic and unruly.
His curls matted and sprung, his eyes ricocheted and scorched, his skin sweating and bare. 
Telling Landon to cool yielded the success of a lifeguard whistling to the floatie-armed children running along the poolside.
You could feel the sunburn of his unstable brain like unhinged flip-flops.

I’d welcome the dysfunction of adjusting to four Daylight Savings to feel him again. 
Landon was Grief and Good in every season.