In The First Year After My Brother

Dear Zeke,

So it’s been two months and seventeen days since you killed yourself, two months and sixteen days since we found out about it. I’m still pretty mad I think. But overall I’m mostly just numb. Like, I don’t really give a shit anymore; about you, what you did, or about the things in my life in general. I no longer find joy in music or seem to have a passion for writing. And I only just found a book interesting enough to have a real desire to read it. Although one could probably argue that these things were becoming true, if not were already true, long before you killed yourself. Your actions two and a half months ago gave me a reason to respond with when people asked me why I looked sad, lonely, withdrawn or angry. And I don’t know whether to say thank you or fuck you. Thank you for helping me hide my depression, self-harm and poor self-esteem, or fuck you for stealing my thunder. Fuck you for making mom cry and leaving me to hold her together all alone. [Fuck you for making sure no one believes me when I insist that this numbness and anger were present before you killed yourself. That is has always existed in the background of my mind, only coming out to play when my protector is away.]

I was so determined to make twenty-nineteen the best year of my life, but then you had to go and fuck it all up.

I think having the balls to shoot yourself was probably both simultaneously the most cowardly and bravest moment in your twenty-two years (twenty-one years plus the year of your birth). I have no doubt that it took a lot of you to pull that trigger, but I also know that if you had somehow survived that gunshot, you would have lived to regret your final decision.

I’ve always known you to be a very rational creature. [I’ve witnessed you stopping in the middle of a heated argument-mid sentence no less-and apologize because you realized you were wrong.] But suicide is very frequently viewed as a very irrational decision. So how can those two facts both be true? From my perspective, either the big brother I thought I always knew was a lie or the stranger who was STUPID enough to get drunk and pull that trigger was a lie. Both individuals changed my world forever. Both now lie dead before me.

I’ve been struggling to still trust all the advice you’ve given me over the years. How is it smart to follow in a dead man’s footsteps? For how can doing so lead to anything other than your same demise? Tell me, brother, why should I trust you, when your actions now have you buried six feet down?

I used to want to be like you. And a part of me still does. A part of me wishes I were six feet down too. But a stronger part of me, the one who saw, and is now living with the consequences of your most deadly misjudgment, knows without a shadow of a doubt which of us was right about Crank. Although among your monsters, Meth did not reside [to my knowledge, anyway] your monsters were close a-fucking-nuff to kill you.

[Regardless however, I wish I had been strong enough while you were alive to tell you the truth plainly; that I will stand by you though anything and everything. My one regret now that you're gone is having failed to tell you that no matter what happens, no matter what mistakes you make and no matter where you end up in the next life, I will stand by you, period. No if's and's or but's. End of story. And so, I will make you a promise here and now;

If you're not in paradise with me when I get there,]

I’ll see you in hell, brother!