Burned

You never want to believe that the brother you love has a mental illness. You want to call it alcoholism or drug addiction and put him in a box that you can understand because you can only see the world through your own squinting eyes.

Two hours ago, less than two weeks after your father’s death you get a phone call that he went into the garage of his ex wife’s house, doused himself in gasoline and then lit a match. He was found only because her visiting friend heard screaming and came up from the basement to find him in flames.

When you learn to write, there is an exercise that many teachers will give to allow you to pry into your own subconscious. They have you wander into the basement of a childhood home and feel around, feel the cinder block walls, smell the soot and mildew, let the dampness around the sump pump touch your skin. Then find a hole, a hole that never existed when you lived in the house, and walk through. Describe what you see:

A brother, rail thin, running through the yard and down to the creek. A brother running after me. A brother that wants to be in our club, that wants to swing across the rope we tied to the tree above the creek, a brother that you trained to wrestle and fight and not to be afraid of anything, and then a brother lost, a brother bearded, a brother with eyeballs the size of gumdrops and then you see this brother running, alone and lost, nineteen years old in the same city where you grew up and you hear that this brother now believes that he is Jim Morrison and Jesus Christ.

And then you hear the voices of the people that unintentionally killed your love for putting words on paper. You hear them yelling about redundancy and self consciousness and Sigmund Freud and commas. You want so much to get back to the place where words made everything make sense. But you cannot.

You can only know that you do not know, and that should be enough. Knowing is not up to you. Knowing is hubris. Knowing is you at age sixteen, forcing your brother to put Copenhagen in his lip and not spit out any of the juice, you telling his twelve year old mind that tobacco will make him a man. Then you play catch. Catch consists of you using his swaying body as a target, of you aiming the ball like a bullet into his chest.

And you wonder if it was you that killed him. You wonder if it was you that somehow brought on this mental illness. And you wonder what it feels like to be on fire. You wonder what they wrapped him in before loading his body into the helicopter. You wonder about whether or not you will be able to feel his spirit if he dies in the sky.

You know that the love you have for your father rides with you in your mother’s car. You know that this love sits beside you on a plane. You also know that you were never able to understand exactly why your brother did what he did or felt what he felt.

You have this gift of the moment. Do not let any tell you what to do or what to write or how to grow or who to befriend. Do not let anyone tell you anything. Walk with love, filled with the spirit of all that connects us. Run with the notion that you will never get there. Look out to the clouds when sitting next to the airplane window, and if he dies, should he die, know that he exists within there. Know that you need not know the chemical composition of a cloud or a rose in order to appreciate the sensation you receive.

Know you do not need a mind or a body to inhale the love that is within. Know there are some not made to stay on this earth. Know that this is their journey. Know that this is yours.