lost.

I've been asked to speak at my cousins funeral next week.
And i am staring at the blank screen as a thousand memories compete for space on the page. And i wonder if i should go for light hearted, sentimental, short and sweet or something else entirely. And I have ideas about writing about how mental illness can effect people, and about how i once nannied two cousins, a boy and a girl and about how i dreamed of them on the night he died. My sentences keep starting with "I only knew a few months of life without him and now even a week seems too much to be without him again" or "we were thick as thieves up until his life took a turn in an entirely different direction to mine and now we will never be on the same road again" or "Why on earth did i press reject on the last phone call he will ever make to me? I was busy filling in divorce papers with a man that he never thought was good enough for me."

None of this is what i want to say about him. About his life. About the little blonde kid who taught me the world "slut" and stole my dads rum with me one year in Byron Bay. About the teenager who dressed in drag and let me take photos of him around the family pool. About the adult who shared a cigarette and rum with me behind a water tank, because even at 29, we didn't want to smoke in front of our dads. The thing is, i don't know what i want to say. What is the thread? The rum? Times he grinned in my direction? Things that went wrong in his life that never went wrong in mine?

For the first time ever, i am lost for words.