to the boy with brown eyes and a contagious smile

Hi.   

 

It’s kinda weird to be writing you, ignoring that whole you’re-dead thing, since you couldn’t read when you were alive. Who knows if you understood the things we said around you and to you. I like to think you did. You were always singing in your special way, always smiling. Mom tied a bandana around your neck to catch the drool. Not a pretty image, but now we always connect those to you. There’s an ornament we put at the top of the Christmas tree, a clear glass bulb with one of your red ones balled up inside it. She looks at it with eyes that don’t really see it. They see you, see your entire life. I keep to myself, letting her have her private moment with you. She needed more of those before you died.

 

I wish she could have gotten them. I wish you hadn’t died. Wish you weren’t sick. But this is life, isn’t it? We’re given things to deal with, and we have to find our way through the hands pulling us down to hell. We have to fight back and remember why we long for the light. We can wish and hope and pray and long for anything we want. Doesn’t mean it will happen, obviously. If I had it my way you never would have been sick, wouldn’t’ve put such a hardship on Mom and Dad. I would have played with you, wanted you to show me the best trees to climb, the best rocks to find worms and salamanders under. I found those myself. I’d have gotten your hand-me-downs too since you would have been able to run around, growing and getting more muscular. Even at my tiniest though I don’t know if I would have been able to comfortably wear your shirts; I could walk, wrestle, play in the dirt. You could sit in a wheelchair.

 

I’d sit on your foot pedals when my legs got too tired. I remember I did that when we went to Disney World. You reached forward and touched my hair; it was white-blonde then and probably looked like the sun was reflecting at your knees. Sometimes I feel like I can still feel your gentle touch. It’s probably just me wishing, though. I was barely six when you left.

 

I know you’re still around. That sounds like a mix of me being a little crazy or a little too religious but I promise it’s not. You know how I feel about churches, how the other women abandoned Mom after you died. When she needed someone more than ever. I think it helped when I had that dream though. It’s been almost fourteen years since I had it but it’s one of those things I’m never going to forget, you know? I took your existence for granted and I’m the one you came to in a dream only days after we buried you.

 

The first thing I saw was the water; kinda hard to miss all of it, I know, but it was purer than anything I had ever seen before. Mom and Dad took Phil and me to Bermuda a few years ago and you could see the coral and the fish without even being in the water but yours was better than that. there wasn’t any coral, fish, sand, dirt; just the white edges of the most beautiful, endless pool I had ever seen, and you. No wheelchair, no disease. You didn’t even have your withered legs. They were replaced by the bottom half of a dolphin’s body, silver blended with your pale skin. The snapshot in my memory has you leaping into the air, arms over your head in an amateurish dive. And your eyes- it was the only time I’d ever see them truly focused on something. I don’t know what you were looking at, what you were thinking, but I knew what you were feeling. Because even being a bodiless person watching you in a dream, I felt it too.

 

I didn’t know you were frustrated when you were alive. It makes sense in retrospect, since it must have been noticeable to you that we were walking and you couldn’t even straighten your legs all the way and had to be propped up just to sit. In that dream though freedom was screamed from every drop of water, from the tip of your fins to your fingernails. You jumped and jumped and swam, a pure boy with a pure heart in pure water, all with pure, innocent joy.

 

The only time I’ve felt anything remotely close to that was when I was on stage, dancing. You probably remember that, seeing as you’re my guardian angel. (Thanks for keeping me alive, by the way. You suck at keeping me from getting injured though.) It was on my seventeenth birthday, and I was at dance class. I remember feeling my meniscus tear, but it didn’t hurt. I didn’t know what it was at the time. Next morning I almost collapsed in the kitchen when I tried to go to swim practice. My leg was so swollen there was a straight line from my thigh to my calf, one straight tree trunk of a limb.

 

If I hadn’t gotten hurt though, maybe I would have been too fast to go to school where I am now. Maybe I would have ended up at Chapel Hill instead of Wilmington, training under Mom’s ex-boyfriend (talk about swimcest, by the way. Swimmers need to stop dating each other). If I had gone there, I wouldn’t have met some people I think you would have liked too.

 

Going back to the whole if-you-were-alive thing, you would have met Andrew. Can I tell you how strange it is to date someone with the same name as one of your siblings? I dated a Phil in high school and my swim coach loved to tease me for it. Anyway, I think you would have liked him. Even Dad said that Andrew was a good kid. As you know he has NEVER said that about any guy I’ve been involved with. Granted he didn’t meet a lot of them, but Andrew was different. I had hoped to be with him for a long time, really long-long time, but you know how that ended up.

 

I think one of the reasons it hurt so much when Andrew dumped me is because he was so good. He didn’t yell, didn’t pretend to like me just because I have a flat stomach and decent legs. The first time he kissed me I had the entire clichéd experience- toes curled, heart pounded, got dizzy and was breathing a little too hard after just a peck. Any other guy I kissed I would be excited, yeah, but I’d think oh hey I’m kissing so-and-so this is awesome. That didn’t happen with Andrew. God he took my breath away. I wouldn’t tell you that if you were alive though…I think that would go in the too-much-information category. You never got to experience a first kiss at all so I wanted to tell you what it should feel like. It hurts to think back to it, since it’s barely five months later and he’s moved on with his life, getting ready to graduate and start his life in the real world and I’m sitting here writing a letter to my dead brother pretending I’m not just a sophomore.

 

I’m sorry if that sounded mean. I’m tired of being in a young body with a mind as old as mine. “Extremely mature,” people call me. Freakishly mature. I‘m a little too middle-aged sometimes. I think about the consequences before I do anything because if it’s something that can hurt Mom you can be sure as hell I’m not doing it. She had enough trouble with Phil coming home twice a little too drunk for being under twenty-one, holding his hand because he punched something (usually something metal, the dumbass) and broke it. Twice, too, do you remember that? I think about how if I got a DUI or even just an underage drinking ticket, or if I did badly in a class, or if I become friends with the wrong people. What if something happened to me? Mom and Dad survived the loss of one child. I will not put them through losing another.

 

I can’t say I’ve never drank anything alcoholic anymore, but I can say that I’ve never drank at a big party that could have been busted. I’ve only had seven drinks ever, three of them over a couple weekends with Andrew, who is twenty-two by the way and the only person I will drink around; three of them one night alone, just to see how it would affect me (the science nerd in me was curious how the lack of social atmosphere would affect how I felt), and one a few days before Andrew dumped me. I knew it was coming and I wished I had something stronger that a Mike’s.

 

Are you proud of me that I’m a few days away from twenty and I can count how many drinks I’ve ever had on two hands? Most people I know can’t count their drinks from one night on their hands and their toes combined. I feel guilty for having drank ever but it’s so hard to be the outsider all the time. It’s not as bad as it was last year, when I never went out, but it still sucks being one of the few sober people at a party. If I’m in a bad mood during the day at all drunk people will piss me off before I even talk to them and I can’t deal with it. I’ll stay in my room all night playing solitaire, wishing I had someone who wasn’t in love with getting drunk every weekend.

 

That’s one of the things I really liked about Andrew. Sure, people on the team called him an old man, but I called it maturity. He realizes consequences, has goals, had me. Got rid of one of those, but kept the important two. I’m sorry to be talking about Andrew again. I just thought he was something special and then he was gone. It makes me so cynical about pretty much everything and it amazes me that someone can find another person they want to spend their entire life with. The older I got the more I realized that our parents didn’t come into this world as middle-aged and married. They have exes, failed jobs, and memories of a time that I’ll never get to experience. They found each other, fell in love, and decided they didn’t want to break up. Ever. It sounds so simple when I put it that way.

 

That’s one thing that always impressed me about them- how they stayed together, leaning on each other for strength, after you died. I’ve heard of parents splitting up after a death like that, even if they have other children. They’re still goin strong, as you know. Mom still complains about how cold it is and Dad just kinda sits there and plays music in his head, strumming his fingers on his leg and humming along.

 

 

I can’t help thinking about life if you had been healthy. Phil and I would probably be closer and you and me, obviously, and god just to think of having two over-protective brothers watching over me makes me feel so loved. It’s making me cry right now. I took your life for granted and now you’re gone. It’s taken me almost a decade and a half to realize that.

 

No one in our family would be as strong as we are if you hadn’t left us. I don’t think I would be as good of a writer, since a bunch of my pieces are about sad, emotional things. I know how to make people cry; I think that’s because I was only six when you died, only a few years into making memories that would last. I remember waking up that morning, Mom telling me you died. I remember the funeral, asking my best friend’s mom if her daughter was there because I wanted to play. Most of all I remember Mom sitting in the rocking chair in your room staring out the window. I was quiet then. I didn’t understand death but I knew how it affected Mom and Dad. Even now, one of my greatest fears is being a bother to someone. I never want to burden someone with my problems. That’s why I cry alone in my car at night, so my roommates won’t hear me. That’s why I haven’t told Mom that I think I might have depression too; I’m supposed to be the happy kid.

 

I bet you’re happy in heaven. You were happy down here, lying in the sun on the living room floor, settled into your nest of blankets with the dog sleeping behind your knees. He joined you this past November. I’m so jealous you get to have him. Is he still as gray and swollen as he was before he died? Or did Heaven take off the years of heart failure and make him into the puppy you knew?

 

Mom wrote me an email to tell me he died. If she had done it on the phone I think we both would have started sobbing. I must have accidentally deleted it, but I think I remember it pretty well- Mickey died in his sleep this morning, just like his boy thirteen years ago. That’s what did it for me. I grabbed a bunch of Kleenex and tried not to think.

Was your death as smooth as that; an inhale, an exhale, and an exit? Mom and Dad never really told me what happened. We don’t talk about that stuff; it’s turned taboo in our house. I don’t want to hurt them more asking if the doctors had ever pinpointed what killed you. They told me in kid terms that you were handicapped and it wasn’t until I was eighteen that I read through some of my old medical files and found out you had cerebral palsy. Did you have one last grand mal seizure, lying alone in bed that night? Did you just slip away? I’m not one for praying but I’ll pray that you weren’t scared. I’ll pray that you died similar to Mickey, knowing you were surrounded by family, safe as you could be. I’ll pray you were happy.

 

I miss you. Send Mom and Dad a happy dream, telling them you and the dog are okay. For me, please?

 

Your little sister

Author's Note

this is for my final nonfiction piece. constructive criticisms very welcome.