The Things We Cannot Say

by Kelly Rimmer

I’m doing the best I can, it’s usually not good enough and that’s just the way it is.

Even as a child and a teenager, Tomasz had a way of speaking that made you think that anything was possible.

Time has a way of diluting how we remember things, but there are some memories too pure for even the ravages of the years,

Perhaps it’s just a side effect of holding the memory so close to myself over the years, replaying it in my mind over and over again as if it was my favorite film.

You and I were made for each other—so whether you come to be with me or I come home to be with you—we will always find our way back to one another. This is just a little pause now, but you’ll see. Time apart will change nothing.”

Aleksy’s death was somehow too simple and quick to be real, one single shot to the back of his head, and then he was gone. I wanted to protest—surely a life so big couldn’t end like that, without dignity or purpose or honor?

Aleksy Slaski was a good man, but the very things that made him so central to our township—his intelligence, his training, his natural ability to lead—also made him an immediate target.

You simply knock out the foundations, and a natural consequence is that the rest begins to tumble.

“Sometimes, not understanding something is the wise thing to do,”

But I no longer asked my father to ask after Tomasz in the town, and I no longer prayed for news of him. Every other piece of news in those past months had changed things, and never for the better, so I told myself that even deafening silence was preferable to noise if the noise always ended in grief.

just because our suffering isn’t the worst, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.”