That last time I visited him. The last time we made love. The last time I felt that the happiness we had was not destined to self-destruct.

Go over it, over, over. No, again. Again. Again.

One more time it's going to make sense. 

In that moment, I heard my heart break, like a flower stem snapping, a clean, small sound.

I wish I could go back to believing, knowing beyond any doubt, that this dangerous and fragile thing between us could have lasted forever. That it wasn't dangerous. That it wasn't fragile.

That it was good and mine forever.

"It produces feelings of increased energy, euphoria, emotional warmth and empathy toward others, and distortions in sensory and time perception."

Isn't that what falling in love feels like, too?

...

When I was with him I wrote all the time. Now, I stare at this screen and I don't know what to say.

...

I dreamt of my grandfather last night in his most lifeless state. We sat at a holiday table and his face was swollen. I met my mom in the kitchen. 

"We have to take him to the hospital. What's wrong with his face?"

Later, in waking life, I visited my grandmother with him.

"Larry, kiss me." Then, she said, "Come near to me, Larry." Finally, "Do you think I'm dying, Larry?"

That afternoon, in the cold wintry light I watched as he said, "You're doing fine, little girl."

Don't Think About It Too Much

Sex shapes the body, juice shapes the mind.

I curse myself because I can’t sleep, just when I’m with him. The temperature has changed, the cold snap moves between us, hanging gauzy in the air.

“I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” he said.

“Me, too.”

Rap music played.

He kisses me and I nod out and when I wake up all I want is more.

Take A Fall For Me

And the saddest part is that the overriding part of him will like being alone. While he's relieved, I'll spend months reminding myself it's over.

Black Sheep

It was the Halloween before I left home.

Matt and I were dressed up to go out to a party in the west end held by a couple of my cool friends in a cool band. I was dressed as Liza Minelli in Cabaret, too dressed up, more dressed up than anyone else was going to be. Cabaret was my favourite movie. When I was bored, I’d imagine myself as Sally, skinny eyebrows and bowler hats.  That night, I spent an hour pinning all my hair under a short black wig. I didn’t stop until all my blonde was hidden. At that point in my life, I took a special pride in doing what I’d set out to.

An hour after I arrived, five minutes before we left, Matt looked at me. 

“Oh, you cut your hair, eh?”

There was a drawn out pause.

“It looks good,” he said.

“This is a wig.”

“Is it?” His face didn’t move. There was no inflection in his voice. 

“Yes,” I said.

Do you really think I cut my hair? Why would I do that? I’ve always loved my hair, I wanted to say. 

Though, in retrospect, this was the indicator that something was really wrong, this moment didn’t scare me. There was only one thing that scared me about Matt. The one thing that made us truly different; he did not care if he lived or died. 

The speed doctors had prescribed him from when he was seven years old, for his ADHD, made him never hungry and never tired. He never seemed to need anything that kept normal people alive. Instead, his death instincts grew stronger. He never slept because his heartbeat kept him awake. He went a week without showering and brushing his hair or his teeth. Dirty laundry was always all over his room no matter how much I tried to do the wash. 

When the Adderol was good, when it was working for him, he’d write rap songs for seventeen hours a day, always pacing back and forth, his voice echoing through our house. 

A.D.H.D was a diagnosis my father never accepted, “Please. It’s more like I.D.G.A.F.”

At this point, I would laugh when my father said this and agree. “Yeah. Matt has I Don’t Give A Fuck.”

That Halloween, Matt was the highest I’d ever seen him. I had started reading about psychotic episodes. I was always a touch psychic with my brother. We were more twins than siblings; I felt what was happening to him as strongly as I felt what was happening to me. Had he broken his leg, my leg would’ve hurt, too.

“You know why I do drugs?” Matt asked that night.

“No. I don’t want to.” 

“It’s the only time the visions stop.” And then he laughed. “That’s the opposite of most people.”

By this point, I had tried multiple interventions with Matt. So had my mother, and in his own way, by screaming and hissing, so had my father. I knew Matt wasn’t going to stop doing drugs. 

“You can tell Mom I’m getting better if you want.” He and I were sitting in the bathroom of the house party. I was on the counter, my feet kicked up against the tub, counting the runs in my black tights.

Matt was hunched over that counter, procuring cocaine. 

“You are getting a little better,” I lied.

When you love a drug addict, you don’t enable them, but, when you really love a drug addict, you can't leave.

“Why did Dad talk to you about his visions and not me? They didn’t happen to you. They happened to me.”

Are you sure? I wondered.

“He’s fucked up,” I said.

“You’re his favourite.”

I wanted to take off my wig. It was starting to itch.

Three weeks later, we admitted Matt. He was diagnosed bipolar. My mother was left was three questions. Why was he a drug addict? Had he done the damage himself, with the drugs? Or was he born sick?

My father and I knew the answer to the first one. Only, we had one more. Had we driven him crazy by telling him what he saw wasn’t real? 

Black Sheep

I sat with my mom in the car on the way home from the mental hospital. It was Matt’s third admittance. It was four months before I left.

My mother had taken to holding herself, arms wrapped around her waist in inappropriate hug that did no one any good. When she was driving, I pried her hands away from her stomach at red lights.

“You need to focus.”

I turned on a rap cd. 

“Don’t,” she said. “I can’t listen to that music anymore. It ruined Matt. All those words, swirling around his head, made him crazy.”

I rolled my eyes when my mother said that but I wondered, later, if she was right. Maybe Jay-Z and Tu Pac Shakur and Kanye West and The Geto Boyz and Wu Tang Clan were the culprits.

The days got longer, my showers got hotter and my iPod was glued to my ears.

Three days later, Matt looked at me and said, “Biggie Smalls is like Hemingway, you know? So simple, such eloquent prose. Marla, Marla, I have to tell you something. Listen to me, okay? Listen! When you move, Marla, fall like a fucking thunderbolt.”

I nodded. He was crazy but he was poetic.

I have to be honest. It was around that time, that I too began to question if what I was seeing was real.

Strictly Reserved For You

 "All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it."

...

His family loved Christmas. His house seemed to contain no mysteries, to her jealousy and wonder. 

From this period, buried under crisis, she knew she was unreliable witness, that she could not be true to the events unfolding, only the impressions they left her with. 

Therein lay the problem.
...

It was the Christmas her brother's brain set fire. 

It was the Christmas her grandparents began to die. 

It was the Christmas mother lost twelve pounds overnight. 

It was the Christmas she had walking pneumonia for six weeks without knowing. 

It was the Christmas she had a cyst that could've been cancer, but was really a left-over from when she was a fish.

Branchial cleft cysts act like cancer but are remnants of embryonic development and result from a failure of obliteration of the branchial cleft, which in fish develop into gills.

 Although it was odd to picture herself as a fish, it felt biblical, fitting.

It was the Christmas she had learned to breathe under water.

...

"You're turning twenty five, Kate. Wow."

"I feel twenty five."

"Yeah? How's it going with that guy? Are you going to marry him?"

"I don't feel like we're going to move backwards."