One aunt and 86th grandmother

My first impression of the room was that it's badly lit. The furniture was mostly dark and the yellow lighting and yellow walls did not make it easier, any of it. Then there're these antiques that have a museum feeling to them, and even though they were clean and shiny, they felt dusty and rotten from the inside like these yellow walls.

I hadn't seen him in quite a long time ever since that time at his grandmother's house when, in the middle of a silent dinner jeweled by plainest silverware, his aunt dropped dead after having laughed too much to kill certain silences that were only to kill her sooner. And then, on the busy plate which she had arranged very carefully, her open mouth dug a deeper hole into the family that already formed a well-wormed apple. Grandmother, of course, started laughing with/at the now-dead aunt, the rest of the aunts screamed and ran towards her, the uncles stood still staring at one another depending on the seating order. The kids that were sitting at the other table continued eating as if they're trying not as hard as they can to show dead-aunt they have learned all her jokes. At the other end of the table, in my own silence, I needed a picture in my head to remind me of how the fiancee meets the whole family in the grandmother's birthday in a much more well arranged world. I heard his steps walk out, I followed him, taking time to process at least his steps. He wasn't there. And so, I drove home and forgot numbers and letters that refer to him.
I put the things that have his smell or feel in the corner to an empty room in the house.
And I moved to another place.

Remembering this I realize that this room of the house must be decorated by one of the screaming aunts. In a wooden-gold-painted-frame there's a picture of a girl I can recognize as one of his cousins. She must have been around 12 when the laughing dinner incident occurred. How she fought to be on the dinner table with the 'adults' and how easily she lost!
He said in his letter that she's top of her class and has dreams to work as a doctor and go abroad for masters and be successful and this and that. Yes, he definitely changed, he was never even the shadow of a father figure to anyone but himself, at times, and to random strangers who asked for directions! He also said in his letter he "need[s] help with something that only someone who cares but does not know [him] well at the moment could help [him] with." Like many other instances he has left me here to wonder.

(to be continued!)