Ryan Part 1

My mind is a disaster.  I cannot sleep.  I have never felt so much pain.  I see him everywhere I look.  I feel him sitting on my porch or lying on the couch watching me.  I know that it is only the shame and fear and guilt that are working their way out of my skin, but I find it very hard to breathe.  I feel like I am dying a slow death of grief on the inside.  I look in the mirror at myself and I see me looking back, only this girl has a vacancy in her eyes that only comes from a huge and gaping hole in her heart. 

I can hardly bear the pain, but then I remember the love.  I remember what it was like for him to hold me in his arms and tell me how much he loved me.  I can still hear his voice saying, “I love you Sis.”  I still remember dancing and singing and celebrating life every day, and I am having such a hard time understanding why that is not possible anymore.  This is insane.  There is no way that my little brother is dead.  There is no way that he really hurt himself so he cannot be with us anymore.  There is no way his soul has departed from mine.  Only it has. 

It hurts so badly because our souls are made of the same thing.  There is so much light and love inside of us, but there are also dark places, demons, and sadness.  We have suffered loss unimaginable to most, and still we try to keep moving every day.  Or we did, but he gave up the fight and I cannot understand why.  We are people of action.  We do the damn thing every single day.  We do not give up.

I am so very angry at him, but then I feel guilty for being angry because stupid anger is what got me into this horrible mess in the first place.  I was angry with him because I thought he was really making stupid decisions, and I was not speaking with him.  I feel like holding my love hostage could be a part of his sorrow that was so great that he did this to himself.  How alone he must have felt to have done this.  I am older.  I am braver and much stronger.  I should have been the bigger person and just gotten over myself, but I was an idiot.  I will pay this price every day for the rest of my life, and that is almost an unbearable thought.  Anger, envy, malice, and jealousy are sinful because they are things that one cannot get back.  I do not have the option to hold my little brother and tell him how much I love him because he is dead, and there is no coming back from that.

I can cry, lay awake, howl at the moon, and be so sad that I feel myself coming apart at a molecular level but none of that will do any good because he will never come back.  I have made yet another mistake with regret in my life.  I thought I had learned this lesson with my birth mother a few years.  I spent my entire life mad at her, and never gave her a chance to apologize.  She died and I was not sad about her demise.  I was terribly sad that I did not give her a chance to explain her side of the story. 

Family is everything and we come in all different shapes and sizes.  Some of my friends I love just as much as my family, if not even more.  But those people that we love and choose to be our family are the most important things in life.  There is never a reason good enough not to love them with everything we have, because we never know if we will get another chance to tell them that we love them or give them a hug.  My crazy thoughts for today…..  KB