I regurgitate the words on a regular basis, there is no normal, there is no old me. Yet I miss the days when I recognized the person in the mirror, the woman out of her thoughts. The person I used to be is a mere shadow of my present self. My thoughts betray me, and I can’t help but to feel like I am drowning in my own pit of self-sabotage.
My brother is dead and as much as it makes no sense, it makes complete sense. The chaos that has been my heart since he left me is an unorganized amalgamation of fear, love, hatred, anger, abandonment and outright confusion. Life is not fair but in this weird and completely incomprehensible way, I get it. See if it had to be anyone, I am glad it was me. My heart is in the most broken state it has ever been in. Some days I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to speak or even exist. I hate happy people; I hate people with the same diagnosis that survived or that lived even a day longer. I hate people that are healthy, people that take life for granted. I hate so much right now. I hate all because I loved. . .I love. I love him so much I cannot understand the fact that he is gone. I reach for my phone to call him and like a knee jerk reaction I am gutted and reminded of the impossibility of the act. And as much as I want to quite literally tear myself apart, I take pause and say thank you for taking him before us all. Thank you for sparing him from this hurt of having to lose us at any moment in time.
See, he was the oldest brother, but he was the most innocent of us, he needed safer keeping than the rest. He deserved better than life gave him, and he did not receive that. He got worse than anyone deserved except for the tiny act of mercy of sparing him from the pain of the loss of a sibling. He would have been broken, and I could not bear for him to go through this alone.
My brother was extremely misunderstood – for many years by me – and so in that lack of understanding people failed to realize how profoundly he loved. He was rough around the edges to say the least but there was something extremely delicate on the flip of that coin. He was loud and blunt and simply did not care. I was quiet and to myself, in my head often and a child to herself. I was his complete opposite in every way. He was the oldest and I was the baby. I could go on and on about our differences but that type of scapegoat is what kept me from realizing how similar we were. I once was outspoken and full of life, until I was cut down into fragments and the remainder of the glimmers of me were beat into a pulp of submission. He was heartless in the eyes of others because his form of affection was abrasive and crass. I was perceivably cold and heartless because I learned how to hide any form of emotion that made me vulnerable. When I tried to speak up as a child, I was told both by word and by back hand, that I was meant to be seen not heard. And although he and I were a product of nurture. . .or lack thereof, the flaws that came because of our upbringing, were often used as accusations of our shortcomings. But now in his absence, I realize that we were not lacking, we had more love than could be understood. We did not give love in rations and therefor our surplus was too much for the common person to accept.
I don’t know where I go from here because my heart feels like its trapped inside of itself. The only person that gets to see it smile every so often is my son Lennox, to everything and everyone else being myself feels so unnatural because I am hiding in plain sight, and they are okay with the shell of the person I have become.
The H is Silent 