Good Grief

Note: This post will probably bum you out. Sorry for that.  If you do continue, thanks for reading.

Today my little brother would've been twenty-three years old.  

He loved In-n-Out.

He wanted to be a cop, and if I am to be fair, probably would've been the kind that tasers people for no good reason.

He stabbed me in the arm with a pencil for some reason or another when I was fifteen.

He was a fan of Sublime, Johnny Cash, and Led Zeppelin.

I'm sitting here tonight in my den, in the spot Nick always sat in on Christmas morning, trying to convince myself that dates and anniversaries are meaningless, that time is a construct humans have made up, and failing miserably at it.  Two days ago, it was my other little brother's birthday. In two more days it will be a year since Nick died.  I had two brothers. Or do I have them still? It's the grammar of grief that gets me, when to refer to the dead in the present tense, when to refer to them in the past...

I'm trying not to let my demons get to me, trying to tell Despair to stop whispering her wind-through-a-graveyard hisses into my ear, that the times I could've been a better brother are gone now and pointless to dwell on, that just because Nick never got the email I sent him for his birthday last year because I was lazy and sent it a day late and by then it was too late in a whole other way doesn't mean its my fault, that there is no way I could've talked him out of joining the Army, that it was his life and his choice, that his death doesn't mean that I fucked up and failed and didn't the one thing that older brothers are supposed to do above everything else, which is To Make Sure Nothing Happens To Your Little Brother. I'm trying to do all these things and failing miserably at them.

The only thing I'm really guilty of is horribly long run-on sentences, I tell myself.

I'm sitting here, stone-cold sober in the dark in the house I grew up in, the place that's become a three-bedroom, two bathroom memorial to Nick, with an ever-increasing amount of patriotic memorial paraphernalia, pictures of him in every room, buttons, wristbands, cards, flags, carvings, drawings, embroidered pillows...Nick is everywhere in this house and yet he isn't at all.  His belongings sit in the garage, his truck is in the driveway, but he's not here.  There's stacks and stacks of moldy newspapers that hold articles about him, because for my parents, throwing any little bit of anything that has Nick in it away is tantamount to betrayal. It's fine, really.  I understand. 

Nick isn't here anymore, but I swear, I fucking swear to you that right now I can smell the unmistakable aroma of a double-double animal style. Happy birthday, Nick.