Kiwi - Luminary Of The Stars

Gonna kinda merge working on ch 12 and personal projects for a bit. Got 2K down, added to the existing 4K so we’re at about 6K. I anticipate three sections, and the first isn’t quite done yet.

I.

When my brother took his own life, he was wearing two crosses.

My family baffled over this line on the incident report, if only because, other than his dog tags, he notoriously tucked only a single cross beneath his collar. Not for any religious reasons, according to him— he found Christianity silly in practice, even if not in concept— but because it "looks cool." My mother never believed it, with her method of parenting her only blood son like conducting a post-mortem audit. But I did, because I always believed what my best friend said.

Where, then, did this second cross come from?

By way of the Last Will and Testament, I was the vindicable owner of my brother's property, and six months passed before my living room was a maze of cardboard boxes. Computers, game consoles, Army paraphernalia, and all his clothing. It didn't take long before my mother found it.

A Walmart grocery bag, bunched like a soaked rag, containing a single pair of clothing— collar stained with remnants of bile regurgitated from a throat strangled closed—, his watch, and two crosses. One my entire family recognized, and one only I did.

Your Sister Loves You, engraved on the titanium.

It was practice, for my brother to not comment on the birthday presents I sent him every year, unless he actually planned to keep them. Excess belongings make for a heavier rucksack and I knew by the second year to purchase light. I never received confirmation he even received the cross, much less ever wore it. I'd forgotten it existed at all.

I thought that evening, and I still think every evening, my gifted cross was touching the rope. Cheap, metal chains burying in the indented crevices created by gravity and thrashing, sinking so deep the mortician had to utilize tweezers or pliers to extract it before embalming because nobody wants to look at a corpse and actually believe it's a dead thing they're staring at. They may have pumped his muscles full of fluid and slathered the linked mark of the chain to mask it, but the tip of his nose began to decay in his open casket— shriveling like crooked foil paper of skin.

I see it in everybody's nose— future bacteria eating away at the cartilage and tissue above nostrils still pumping oxygen in and out. Is it always the nose that's taken first?

Maybe the cross could tell me, if it wasn't resting on my jewelry box. But it could rust in place or slip off into the crack of my bathroom cabinet, and I will not touch it. I will never touch it again.

II.

I write every day, but I've never written about how I feel about my brother's death. Other than a pamphlet-sized obituary and three pages of a eulogy celebrating our relationship. Those I burnt the midnight oil for— days of writing and revising and editing so as to surmise a person's entire life into a few paragraphs of feel-good malarkey every epitaph must be.

But I lied; as I do, I always lie. What authenticity of our true relationship could be found stashed behind a half-sentence implying "things were rocky eight months before he died." I proclaimed to my family and the world a fabrication, a tall tale, because how could the deceased's best friend take the podium in front of sobbing benches and not share funny anecdotes and well-wishes?

If I told the truth, it would be that I was— and I am— furious. Enraged enough that, if he showed on my doorstep with an epic story of resurrection via magic spell or military experimentation, I would strangle him with the cross lying in my bathroom. I would screech, while his cheeks blossomed violet— write in the fingernails digging into his throat that he owes me an answer, before I kill him again.

When Army officials carried him from the plane's cargo hold, lights from one hundred firefighter trucks blazing it into creamy whites and reds, I thought about doing it, then. Throwing open the casket and demanding those bloodless lips speak. I'd even crack off a finger, like torturing a husk could wrench its soul back just long enough to give me what I'm seeking:

"Why?"

Everyone affected by death always asks that question. My partner would ask why, on their last late-night walk, my brother confessed he would be purchasing a motorcycle and going fishing and ideas for the future someone who plans to be alive in two weeks talks about. Dad's would be: "Why didn't you put me down as beneficiary for your life insurance?" Mom's would be "Why did you hang yourself?"; her lawsuit will be a shoo-in for that million dollar lump-sum, with evidence straight from the dead horse's mouth.

All valid uses of their "why", except the last. My brother didn't leave a note, but that's just one funny thing about this mess. Both her and I know very well why he took his life. He told me himself, those feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness— as far back as his scrawled notebook pages of letters during Basic Training. My brother was sprinting toward a brick wall from the beginning. It was only a matter of when he'd slam into it.

Eight months before he died, I decided I didn't want him to.

III.

My brother was drinking, because he always drank. I was drinking, because I always drink.

Roblox was his video game of choice that night— some fishing simulator I hardly understood, but the medium of our virtual conversations didn't matter so much as the excuse to have one. As was routine, five vodka shots deep and insecurities tumbled into my ears, which I listened to and rebutted. "I'm stupid," you're the smartest person I know. "I'm going to be stuck here for the rest of my life," two more years and you'll live with me, instead. "I don't think anyone understands me," I'd like to think I do.

They morphed, quickly, into sermons of death. Nobody would miss him. His life meant nothing. He wouldn't be alive to see the next couple years.

Then he left for the restroom. And whether by worry or whiskey, I could envision knife whittling through rope, rifle arming at his temple, window throwing open to the three-floor drop below.

We fought, after I called his Base. Fresh out of the hospital, walls and walls of text messages bombarded my phone:

I'm not depressed and I'm not going to kill myself

If you see a problem with my outlook, that's your problem, not mine. You're crazy.

Sometimes I get a bad day where I don't feel so good about myself, guess that must means I'm some suicidal maniac, right?

Family tell me I may have saved his life, that night, but our friendship died for it. Nightly video games transformed into weeks of silence. Suddenly, phone calls were too long for him to manage; texts unmeaningful, and thus ignored. Less than an hour of conversation was shared between us, before I saw him in person again. We played pool, because that was our tradition— another game to occupy our hands while our mouths caught up.

He was on a phone call the entire time.

After the initial spike of adrenaline, upon seeing those Army women at my front door, relief sprung tears from me. Because— see? I was fucking right; I knew; it wasn't just my outlook or he had a bad day or any shitty excuse he gave me. He was lying.

And now he's dead.

IV.

If you leapt out of the box on my living room shelf, I would ask you why you wore my cross.

You weren't, when I saw you. So why, when you kicked the chair out from under you and dangled until your limbs stopped writhing, was a reminder of my affection for you wrapped around your neck? Was I on your mind? Were you apologizing for snapping our friendship in half? Or were you throwing one last jab at me before you went— a sick remark that my love wasn't enough to save your life, in the end?

Does it even mean anything at all?

I'll never know.

That's another funny thing. Human brains are wired to flood with satisfying dopamine when the dots connect— the mystery concludes the way it's been foreshadowed, the final piece fits into the jigsaw puzzle, the tumblr post ramblings wrap up its overarching themes with a tidy bow.

Closure is in the results. The meaning. The conclusion.

V.