After we buried him, there was not one tear.
Because he was gone. Buried.
And life went on.
Without him. Even the six months of my life that I didn’t think on, that my family didn’t speak of, that were etched into the concrete of my soul.
It was so freaking tragic, so painful, it was beyond the point of tears.
“I had to be sedated,” I continued, my voice still cold. Robotic. “I was the one who found him.” I forced myself not to look at the image the words shoved to the front of my mind.
The image of my beautiful brother’s dead body.
I hadn’t let myself think of it in ten years.
Not awake, at least.
My nightmares showed it to me often enough.
But I couldn’t handle it now. So I didn’t. Such things usually weren’t conscious choices. You couldn’t just choose not to be confronted with your worst horrors. In fact, your brain consciously chose to put them in front of you. Because life without pain didn’t exist. The very environment we lived in nurtured pain, multiplied it.
“I found him, called 911, even though it was obvious he was already dead. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t. How can you believe that half of you is lying dead in his own vomit with a needle sticking out of his arm?”
The image assaulted me now. Tore pieces of my flesh from my very bones. I bit my lip, hard, so bitter metallic blood flowed into my mouth.
“I’m not quite sure how long it took for paramedics to come,” I continued. “It could’ve been five minutes. Five hours. Five years. Time doesn’t mean much at the end of your world. I wouldn’t let anyone touch him,” I said, my voice cold and foreign again. “Apparently I became violent.” I screwed up my nose, trying to grasp onto those foggy memories, isolate them from the horror. “I still don’t remember that. I just remember thinking that those people were going to take him away from me, and I knew I’d never see him again, you know?”
I paused, though Gage didn’t answer my question because it wasn’t really a question. He didn’t do anything, in fact, just stood there, staring, yanking at those threads in my soul even harder.
I sucked in a ragged breath. “They were going to tear away half of me.” My voice broke ever so slightly, and I straightened my spine so I wouldn’t break along with it. “So I had to fight for him. For me.” My voice was firmer now. Nothing else was. “Because if they took him away, how was I supposed to survive? How did half a person go on?”
He didn’t answer, but he flinched, not as violently as before but still visibly.
“So yeah,” I whispered. “I was fighting for David’s life. For mine. And I fought hard. Hence the sedation.” I thought back to the sharp prick of the needle, which was all surprise and nothing to do with pain. There was no physical reproduction of the pain of a soul being torn apart. The prick in my skin meant nothing.
Less than nothing.
Then, quickly with the force of the chemicals being introduced into my bloodstream, everything was okay.
No, everything was nothing.
My brother’s wide-open eyes, staring at me with no soul.
Nothing.
His cold body, covered in grime and vomit.
Nothing.
The paramedics zipping him into a body bag and shoving him in the back of a truck like he was no longer a human being, just a sack of meat to be buried in the ground.
Nothing.
And then they wore off.
And then there was everything. A pain so harrowing that each breath I took was a shock because I didn’t realize a human being could continue breathing, continue surviving while in that much pain.
“I swore I would never let a substance take me away from myself the second I became lucid,” I whispered. I didn’t add that the six months after that contributed to my determination. It wasn’t a lie, but I just wasn’t ready to bare that piece of myself too.
“The second the pain came back, I told myself that I’d never let myself do anything to take it away again,” I continued. “Because there’s only one thing in the world that’s worse than your soul being ripped apart, and that’s not caring that it’s happening. That’s what those sedatives did.” I shuddered at the thought of that numbness, moreover at how tempting it was. I continued to hold onto Gage’s image, my hands fists at my sides.
“And I have to care,” I whispered. “David deserves for me to care. Every day. Because somewhere along the way, something happened to him to make him not want to care anymore. And not only do I have no idea what that was, but I didn’t even see him fade away to nothing until he was nothing.”
My thoughts wandered to that horrible image of my precious and beautiful brother’s body being hurled into a bag like trash.