My Brother Wasn't Crazy—He Was Just Seeing What We Couldn't.

My Brother Wasn't Crazy—He Was Just Seeing What We Couldn't

People whispered about my brother.

The kind of whispers that are accompanied by sideways glances and half-smiles.

"He's just a little off."

"You know… artistic."

"Poor kid. Must've snapped."

But I knew better.

He wasn't broken.

He wasn't lost.

He was just… seeing something the rest of us didn't.

It began when he was fifteen.

He informed me, quite matter-of-factly, that the shadows in his bedroom moved when he wasn't watching them.

"They curl up," he informed me. "They curl up into the corners when you glance away."

At first, it was like a game.

Children imagine, don't they?

Except he never outgrew it.

He began to speak of listening to the air hum before something terrible occurred.

Said the buildings breathed and were alive.

That electricity had voices.

He wasn't afraid—just perceptive.

And then the night terrors.

He'd wake up crying out that "they" were in the walls, spying on us sleeping.

He'd sketch them—tall and faceless, warping in impossible ways.

My parents were frantic.

They dragged him to see every physician within 50 miles.

Diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia.

He was medicated, watched, and softly delivered to the system.

He didn't resist at first. But he despised what the pills did to him.

"They don't stop the visions," he said one day.

"They just make me forget they're real."

He pulled away after that.

Stopped smiling. Stopped drawing.

He lived through life like a ghost, anesthetized by science.

Then one spring afternoon, I discovered him barefoot in the rain, standing in the backyard, eyes closed and smiling.

"They go quiet when it rains," he said.

"It's the only time they scatter."

I didn't know what to say.

Part of me wanted to think it was just his head, seeing the world differently.

But another part—the part I kept hidden—whispered:

What if he's not crazy?

A few weeks after that, I was walking to work. Waiting for the city bus.

He called me.

"Don't get on," he said. His voice was strained, desperate. "The shadows are hanging on the wheels."

I laughed nervously. "What are you talking about?"

"Please," he said. "Just don't. Trust me."

I hung up.

And I rode the bus.

Ten minutes later, a speeding truck crashed into us.

Two were killed instantly.

I walked away with a broken arm and a shattered belief system.

At the hospital, he didn't say, "I told you so."

He sat next to me, humming a quiet tune, eyes lost in thought.

"Sometimes," he said, "they show me things before they happen. Sometimes I just feel it."

I didn't request who "they" were.

I wasn't prepared for that response.

Later, I didn't see him as much.

He stayed out in the woods more. Told me it was the only place he could think.

"The trees don't lie," he said to me.

"They whisper, but not like the shadows. They're safe."

His drawings came back—sharper, weirder.

Things that resembled smoke caught in human flesh.

He showed me one with long limbs and a sewn mouth.

"They live on loneliness," he told me.

"On pride. On fear. You can't battle them—you just have to look at them for what they are."

I asked him why he could look at them.

"Because I allowed myself."

The last time I saw him, he was sitting cross-legged beside a stream, observing the water flow over rocks as if it contained secrets.

He didn't say goodbye.

He simply said, "Don't forget to look in the quiet places."

He vanished that night.

No note. No struggle marks.

Just disappeared.

We made a report.

The police looked.

Posters appeared.

But he was gone—like a whisper on the wind.

They say he went crazy.

But I believe he found a vision the rest of us were too scared to embrace.

I still look at his drawings sometimes.

I kept them all in a box under my bed.

And sometimes… at the edge of a rainy night or at bedtime, I know what he was trying to tell me.

Like something at the edge of my vision is collapsing in upon itself.

And I recall him saying,

"They're always there. You just stopped noticing."

So perhaps he wasn't mad.

Perhaps he was merely one of those few who hadn't averted their eyes.

And perhaps—just perhaps—we're the ones who are blind.