100 % Review Forum What If?

Chapter 1: What If Friday, October 21, 20161:18 AMI left the note I had carefully written in my room on my wooden desk, it was informing my parents and the rest of my family what I was about to do, and why I felt the need to do it. Things had gotten bad, so bad in fact, that I felt the need to act and take matters into my own hands. I felt as if my parents weren't doing anything about it, and the same was for the rest of my family. His addiction had worsened to the point where I feared my parent's life as well as mine on a nightly basis. After numerous threats over months and months that we would be shot, stabbed, killed in the middle of the night, and after talk of my mother being beat to a pulp…I couldn’t take it anymore; I couldn’t figure out why he was living with us, but that was about to change.  We had three dormers in the upstairs of our ranch country style home, one in my room, one right as you topped the stairs, and then one in the open living area of our second story. As I waited for my parents to go to sleep I sat in mine and pondered my last few thoughts while eyeing the window, the fog bear in an opaque manner over the country side in the distance, brightened by an old barn light, which stood about two football fields away from our house. It was a cold Kentucky night in January of 2011, the frost on the grass had just began to build up for the deep night and wee morning hours ahead, the moon was shining bright through the clear southern sky like a lamp hovering over a desktop. It was almost a eerily sinister looking night, a perfect setting, in my mind.  "You wanna go walk around with Patch?" I questioned to my brother Tyler as soon as my parents went to sleep, Patch was short for Patches, our pure breed Australian Shepard we had since I was 7. "Sure." he said, with the same softness in his voice he has always had when communicating with me since we were little. "It's cold as f**k, let me put a jacket on and we will go…don't wake mom and dad up." as evil as he had become, he still seemed so innocent and had some flashes of his old self; he was still my big brother.  "We lived in the middle of nowhere, right next to my Uncle Dickie and cousins, my Dad's brothers family. When you turned into the driveway (Swift Estate as it was named) our gravel drive was the immediate left, directing straight up a hill to our house we had built. If you went straight, the gravel road continued about 100 yards split in half by a curve, and Uncle Dickie's house sat right around that left curve which went over a creek that fenced in our entire acreage. The creek by the curve was where I was taking Tyler. We spent endless hours at this very spot growing up when we would come visit Catherine and Elizabeth, Dickie's daughters, during summer breaks. We would try and jump the creek and swing on branches over the water like Tarzan…I can remember like it was yesterday Catherine jumping and not making it and busting a*s in the creek. We all laughed and helped her cautiously, but those were good times, times I wish I could go back to and maybe do things over again to prevent what was about to happen. The questioned lingered: what if?" Tyler had become out of control, a monster to be exact, my own kin I didn't even recognize; not even his smile or what he physically looked like and socially acted like. It was a new person and I hadn’t really seenmy brother since I was in the 8th grade; three years prior.  The type of situation he was in, meth addiction, was something more serious and dreadful than any nightmare I could have ever dreamt up. It took control of his emotions and he was not in command of his actions most times…before I actually knew it was the drugs, I thought he was possessed by the devil; his motives were wicked. It gave him psychotic episodes where he was dangerous, and potentially could put harm on someone. He was diagnosed four major mental illnesses in the years preceding because of his drug usage: Schizophrenia, Depression, Bipolar, and Maniac Psychosis and was in and out of jail and mental hospitals during this time…it was too surreal for me to understand at that juncture. He was totally un-predicatble and that was the most dangerous of all. I didn’t realize exactly the severity of all of this, I just figured he had fried his brain off meth and would be fine if he quit, but he had done something much worse. He had put permanent damage to his brain and overall wellness to a point where he couldn’t even function in our house, public, or society. He was constantly hallucinating and talking crazy about things that weren't happening in the slightest bit; he was un-recognizable and this destroyed me to my core.  "I walked down the steps to ready for him to leave, being quiet as I could since I did not want to wake mom and dad; for a few reasons. They usually got severely angry when we woke them up in the middle of the night, they always had work in the morning early and claimed once they were woken they couldn't go back to sleep. Secondly, if I woke them up, my scheme would be ruined…so I needed to make sure they were sound asleep and I did not make a peep."  The door to the garage opened and shut softly, and we were both standing in the driveway under the moonlight, which reflected only a slight image of his face. He had a grey jacket on zipped up and his hood on, I had the same.  "You ready?" he muttered as he shook from the cold with his hands in his jacket pockets.  "Yeah let's go, let's just walk down the driveway, I wanted to get out of the house." I replied. "I left Patches inside, I thought it was too cold for him…didn't…uh…wanna lose him" I lied straight through my teeth, my plan did not involve the dog coming, that was too much baggage for what was going to occur and I felt it would all execute properly if he just stayed put. Importantly, and surprisingly, he went along with everything and all was going to plan.  "The 12-gauge pump action shotgun was waiting for us at the creek, inside the pipe that ran under the curve to my Uncle's house, I had hid it there the previous night before in anticipation this would all work out and more importantly if I had the balls to even carry out such a plan. Murder was the initial thought, I would estimate around four months before this, I decided to murder my older brother in plain sight hoping our bodies would be easily discovered the next morning by my family as I didn’t want anyone to have to search for us. At first it was something I would only think about late at night when he was up fighting with my parents and I couldn’t sleep because of it, or sometimes after his threats were made to them and me. As time grew on, he grew crazier and more insane than I have ever seen anyone up to this date (and I have been around some real nut job druggies). His actions were devilish and he would be caught talking to himself, laughing to himself, having full on conversations with what sounded like a room full of people…only to be found alone by himself. The addiction had taken over his mind, in full effect right in front of our eyes he gradually melted down to a point where all he could do was hallucinate in front of us; he had lost his mind, flipped. The first episode as I call them was scary and uncannily striking, I remember we all four were watching television one night probably six to eight months before; and he began to laugh to himself. It was a sort of creepy witch laugh, so weird in fact it spooked me to where I would get chills and had to leave the room when I heard it…he was really giggling hard but it wasn’t an out-loud crackle…he was doing it with himself, he was in his own world. Our initial reaction was that he thought something was funny, you know how sometimes you think of something funny and laugh aloud because you remembered it? Yeah me too, except this was not the case whatsoever. Mom and dad used to yell at him, they thought he was doing it to just agitate and get on their nerves, I thought it was Lucifer at work; we were all wrong. " Murder quickly went out of the window, I didn’t feel as if my life was meant to come down to being held on trial for blowing my five year older brother away with a 12-gauge shotgun shell to the head. So it turned into a murder-suicide scenario, I was going to do it. I had made my mind up that I was going to now kill him, and then continue the madness and blow myself away immediately after. There was nothing else for me to live for at this point in time and I felt like it was almost a win-win for my family and I. We get rid of him, no one ever has to deal with that again, and my parents get to live without fearing they would have something happen to them as well; it was a indescribable feeling at the time when I look back on it. I also was not right in the head I would imagine, as I did convince myself this was the only way out of this storm, this was going to end it all and bring the sunshine once again to my family.  "Looking back, you have to be pretty fucked up to convince yourself to do something of this nature but you also have to consider the circumstances I was faced at just 16, I weighed all the options. I day dreamt about it at school, basketball practice, and even supper time right in front of all their faces. I wish I would have just said something to my parents and maybe saw a doctor, bottling it all up brought so much unnecessary anger and raw emotion out of me. It was unreal how hard it was to focus on anything, and when I did finally focus I couldn’t maintain it for I was always thinking about how hellish my life had become, and I had to live under the same roof with the hell raiser himself."