Steel burnt mouth

I don’t remember much of the year following my brother’s death. There was evidence of me being alive, but inside my brain, you couldn’t tell. I remember some of the physical evidence. I know I kept the same job. I know I lived with my parents for the rest of that year, and one more year after that. I know my pants size had gained four inches, and my hair had lost fourteen. I know I saw my sister twice that year; once for the funeral, once for a wedding. I know I couldn’t open his bedroom door for three months, and I couldn’t sleep alone for two years after. The row of shoes lining my bedroom was proof I had left that room. I remember being the one to call my mom to tell her he had passed when no one else could catch their breath; the phone dropping, crying out his name on her way home from that morning’s Easter service. I remember having to tell his friends and his ex-girlfriends through social media, lying to them and myself that he was in a better place. I remember immediately grabbing a suitcase and began to pack clothes for an unknown weekend trip. I didn’t know where I was going, if it would be the state where he had met his untimely death or just away. That suitcase stayed packed for two weeks as my family visited and left my dad’s house. I never went anywhere; I stayed in that room for two more years.

There’s something about the way people react to grief-stricken individuals in their lives. The truecrime-obsessed foam at the mouth of the thought of a new tragedy they can grasp before any other human can digest it. When I shared the news that my brother’s trailer had burned down with all of his belongings in it while he was in jail, my old manager asked me if he had planned it all along and sent a secret arsonist to destroy the so-called “evidence.” The evidence being his vans he wore every day of high school, fiesta dishware my mom passed down to him, and his camping gear he had been collecting since he was in fourth grade. I had an old friend call me after the news broke that my brother had passed. Due to my family keeping the cause of death confidential from my small town, I explained to him my brother’s mental health crisis and how he most likely didn’t know what had even happened to him. The friend asked me if it was possible that my brother was possessed and that he knew a good preacher who could’ve helped him. My brother’s remains were already burned and charred at that point; I don’t know what an exorcism could’ve done to make our situation any better. An old coach from my hometown messaged me his condolences and let me know that my brother was always the sweetest kid. I gave him my thanks, and he told me how beautiful I have become since I was fourteen. He let me know that he was glad such a bright and pretty young woman like me moved back to Texas. I didn’t respond. The thought of the man who taught me eighth grade Spanish calling me beautiful in the wake of my brother’s death made my skin crawl. About a year after my brother’s passing, a woman who went to school with my sister cornered me in the old grocery store on the west side of town and cried as she told me the story of every person she knew who died by suicide. This woman hugged me as I reluctantly shared that my brother did not kill himself, and she looked confused as if a mental health struggle couldn’t conclude in any other way. I left the grocery store silently and quickly as I heard the woman gather her emotions and begin to tell her mother how sad she is for my mother. Something about the way my hair fell, my smile stalled, and my skin bleached seemed to communicate that I was sick. Sick with grief, sick with despair, sick with ennui. I never came back from that. When you taste the cold steel of a gun in your mouth at the age of twenty, you don’t forget that.