Sometimes at work I get lost in my thoughts.
My thoughts were very troubled last night, I relived when I first began to understand my brother's heroin addiction.
I remembered the night that he ran away, and it's amazing the detail with which I can recall it.
Sitting in the living room, listening to him and my parents arguing in the kitchen. My father had flushed the heroin he'd found, and my brother yelling that it wasn't his and that he owed it to someone. My father tried to give him money to pay the guy back, but he refused to take his father's money for drugs. I remember him walking out of the kitchen, I remember that he didn't look at me or pause. I remember the exact coat he was wearing.
I remember sitting in the cafeteria in 5th grade, not speaking, just sitting there wishing someone would talk to me about it. I didn't know who to reach out to, how do you tell a 5th grader that you're scared to death for your brother's life? Sitting there watching them talk and laugh and wondering if I could ever feel happy again.
It was near a holiday, and I was in the car with my mother on the way home from school, and I asked if she thought he would send me a card. She said no, because he didn't love us anymore. She said that was why he left.
I remember the day he came back, how he had done something mean, and I had considered telling my parents, but decided against it. I'm glad that I didn't, didn't ruin the last day I had with him.
Sitting in my room that night, playing an online game and chatting, at 1:30 AM. Going to get a drink, and noticing that my brother didn't come into the hallway when my door opened. The way that the air circulation worked, his door rattled everytime mine opened. Thinking it was odd, wondering if he was okay, and then thinking I should just be glad he wasn't making fun of me. Going to bed to be woken up two hours later.
Walking through the living room and seeing EMS people standing in his door way, and more in the living room, with police, and firemen. Asking my dad over and over "What happened dad?" and seeing them look at me. Knowing now what the look in their eyes meant, watching a little girl being led away to be told that her brother had died.
I was awake and 20 feet away the night my brother died. He was choking to death on his own vomit while I walked into the kitchen to get a drink. I wonder why life does these things to us, why they happen.
It's a thought that still haunts me to this day, everytime someone doesn't answer their phone. That someone you love can be 20 feet away dying and you just don't know. No alarm goes off, no extraordinary sense that something terrible is happening. You're just standing at work or laughing with your friends while it's happening and you just don't know. It can be happening at any moment, right now.
I lost the illusion and safety and certainty 5 days before my 14th birthday.
I still miss Tyler, and I think I always will.
I wonder what he would be doing now, had he lived.. I wonder what it would be like to have him there when I was said, and needed someone to talk to.
But then I know, I learned a year ago something that had never been told to me. Maybe it just seemed insignificant at the time, and it's not the kind of thing you just say.
When my brother was released from jail, well really the reason he was in jail. He had been arrested with a felony amount of LSD. It changed all my thoughts, I fully believe now that there is a very good chance he was trying to kill himself. Had he lived, he'd probably be in prison right now.
It all goes back to her, I know it does. She made us miserable, she left us no way out. She ruined so much.
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