Emmeline Dixon

today you would have been 31. and i'm not going to lie, i'm angry.

i hate having to imagine who you’d be now. i should know. what your life looks like, what makes you laugh, what you do for a living.

i think about all of the little things.

grandma taking you and blaine to buy crickets before fishing all day on green betty. summer nights watching you play baseball until 2 a.m.

that cruise where you ordered endless chocolate chip cookies to the room because, “what mama? they’re free!”

and daddy running to united market early because he’d finished the milk you saved for your morning cookie crisp. he knew he better replace it before you woke up. 😂

i should have almost 16 more years of memories with you. instead, i’m holding on to the same ones i had at 10.

entire years of my life are blank. especially middle school. i remember life before you died and years later, but almost nothing in between.

for years, i avoided thinking about you being gone. i knew you weren’t coming home. i just couldn’t understand forever.

now i talk about you constantly. i named my business after you.

and even when i couldn’t talk about you, i never stopped loving or needing you.

i wish i could tell you about my life and hear you give me hell for it. i wish you could see your name on the packages. i wish you’d been at my wedding.

i’m still just so angry about all the ordinary days we never got.

i don’t have a beautiful explanation for why you died so young. i haven’t completely made peace with it. i just miss my brother. and the future we should’ve had.

i’d give anything for one more night when my biggest problem was you breathing in my face. falling asleep knowing my big brother was beside me. i had no idea i’d spend my life wishing for those nights back.

today we should be celebrating you, giving you hell for getting older, like it’s just another birthday.

instead, i’m trying to fit almost 16 years of missing you into an instagram caption.

and i still can’t.

happy birthday, layne. i’ll always be your little sister. i just wish you were still here to be my big brother.