My Brother

The day after I died, my brother got a frisbee stuck in a tree.

He wasn’t in the habit of messing with frisbees, yet when he woke up that morning, the day had seemed like exactly the type of day to begin messing about with things he usually did not have the time for.

And, because he was not in the habit of messing around with frisbees, he got it stuck in a tree.

It was a tree much too tall for him to climb by himself, the branches stretching to the sky above recklessly, searching for something too far out of reach to be bearable.

He asked my sister for help, a carefully cajoling smile on his face, like maybe the tactics that had failed for eleven years would finally work this time. She called him an insensitive prick and sent him away, her tear tracks hastily tattooed on her cheeks because if they never left, no one could accuse her of not feeling anything.

When he asked my mother, all she could do was blow her nose and wet her six thousandth tissue, too lost in her grief to hear anything but the constant loop in her head that told her that it was her fault in some way. Nothing she had ever done was right, and even if she had succeeded in some way, then it was already six feet in the ground or crushed underfoot.

To ask my father, my brother first had to pull him out of a bathtub of alcohol and antidepressants, and force life back into his lungs. Even after he began to breathe once more, my father was still drowning, choking on everything he had been too frightened to tell me. He watched the seconds tick by on a clock that mocked him with the time he’d already wasted feeling sorry for himself, and finally he the difference between pride and love.

When my brother finally pleaded for me, he broke his own heart, standing at the foot of a tree too tall to climb by himself.

And that is why I stayed.