July 9th

It’s still late Sunday. July 9th. Next Sunday on the 16th will mark 14 years since my younger (and only) brother committed suicide at the age of nineteen. But today marks fourteen years since I last saw or talked to him. He came by my place in Austin during the day. I was meeting some friends later than evening to see the first Pirates of the Caribbean film on opening night, he had plans to do something else but we had discussed going to the lake with other friends that weekend and trying to catch Bad Boys II the following week when it came out. At some point that afternoon he stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Then I noticed he had just left without saying anything. At the time I remembered that it felt unusual, not that he would’ve made a big deal about leaving, but it definitely seemed out of the norm to just take off without letting me know he was going. And then a week went by and we hadn’t seen each or talked again, which wasn’t horribly unusual. I remember having a conversation with him in my head while in the shower about a particularly eventful baseball game that had happened during that week. The kind of simple, faux conversation you have in your head imagining what you’d say to that person if were talking to them at that exact moment. I never got to have that conversation with him. And that week that went by so quickly and seemingly so unremarkable ended up being far different than I could’ve ever imagined. That part of my life and the world I inhabited during that time feel so alien to me now. What was it like before? What was it like right after? How does it feel now, with everything else I’ve felt and gone through since then? Does it all pile up, does it all just fade away?