Unfinished thoughts

I can imagine the chest-spreaders inserted as they hooked into the ribs. Cold corpse remains of what a few hours ago was a birthday boy. I imagine the cartilage cracking and bending as they separate the membranes to fish out the organs for weight and testing, though the cause of death was pretty clear. She had told me when she went to identify the body that the top of his head was smashed into a cone shape, it had been embedded into the tree. One eye dangling down his cheek, looking in a different direction than the other. I'm not too scared to face these demons, I want to know. I want to know what she saw. I would have lived this for him if I could go back and do that. She said his legs were jammed up and into his chest. I didn't see the wreckage but there was a lot of glass. She found his cell phone in a branch. There was glass in the tree, as if it had grown there the whole time. Glass from his window which his head went through and then into the bark. They say there was a faint pulse, that the first to arrive had seen momentarily he was alive, albeit in some most likely brain-dead manner. That's not really living. His liver was lacerated. Even if his skull hadn't been caved in I feel like he wouldn't have survived due to that. But perhaps it's possible. So at the morgue, what do they do? Did they open the shattered casing of his skull and remove the remnants of his obliterated brain matter? Throw it in a scale, weigh it out...Remove the organs, weigh them out...Slice off a piece of lacerated liver for toxicity tests, tests show he was not intoxicated. Happy birthday, birthday boy. It was your night, the one you'd dreamt about for so long. When black and white dreams turn to color dreams of your death on your birthday, it has to mean something. You shouldn't have gone, shouldn't have gone. Should never have trusted. So they sewed you back up, a hollow shell of a human, innards removed. At the wake you looked nothing like you. Body rigid and thin, they didn't do the best job making you look normal but what the fuck could you really do with a train wreck like that? There's no fixing that, no making that look pretty. Eyelids sunken in. Could've stuffed them with more cotton, at least make it seem like there's something there. Makeup covering abrasions on your cheek. I could still see them. I tried so hard, tried to reach over your body to place an item in the casket with you. My god, that was the most horrifying thing. Just being there next to your lifeless form, reaching. Over. Terrified. Arm stretching, hand shaking. I got on my tip-toes. To reach. I almost couldn't make it without...I just...it was so hard...You're not there anymore. You're nowhere. You don't exist anymore. There is no god, there is no heaven, there is simply the lack of existence after death. A bright flame snuffed out, a life stolen, extinguished without mercy. The days that followed, I hallucinated out of grief. And at night I saw you in my head, I saw your corpse stiffly walking through the room, turning your head and looking at me with eyes that were closed. Thin-chested and straight-armed, stiff-legged and dead. A walking shell. Looking at me with eyes that were closed.