#I had specifically chosen Thailand because I knew my grandmother liked Thailand

[secretariatess]

 .

[mami-kcarmel]

I grieve wrong

I grieve wrong.  

 My brother died.  It’s a weird sentence.  Unexpected. My uncle… my grandma… my father… maybe even a cousin… My brother died.  It’s weird.

 I don’t know how to talk about him.  I don’t mean in terms of “don’t speak ill of the dead” or anything.  Pretty sure the dead could give fuck all what we say about them.  I mean grammatically/ linguistically.  Is he past tense?  Or is it my relationship to him that is past tense?  Do I have a dead brother, or DID I have a brother?  I went to the beach with a friend a few weeks ago, and she brought another friend of hers who was a question asker.  She’s curious, nothing wrong with that.  She asked if I had brothers and sisters.  I panicked and lied… didn’t know what to say about the brother.  It was small lies, I HAVE two sisters and a brother.  Next lie came about where they live.  Too late to say one doesn’t live anywhere, so I continued to lie.  Luckily the questions stopped before I had to elaborate.

 I never know what to do when someone dies.  Death is so fucking stupid.  It’s magic dressed up like science and not even good or interesting magic.  It’s the most blunt unimaginative of magics.  The body runs out of life juice.  You can say why, kind of, but at that moment, that precise moment and not the next or the one before?  Magic.  Dumb stupid magic.  

 My sister remembers us laughing at my Papi’s funeral.  I mostly remember what I wore.  Black pants and a burgundy silk blouse.  I remember we all tried on his hats after.  Years later I sobbed openly when I saw the Cuban flag landing in Varadero. Didn’t know I knew what the Cuban flag looked like until I started crying at it.  Then there was the time I found out a friend had committed suicide outside of an ice-cream shop.  To this day, I don’t know what I did with the ice-cream cone in my hand.  I’d tell if I remember eating it.  I would.  I really really just remember wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do with it. In terms of space-time continuum, I must have made a decision.  I don’t remember what it was.  

 With my brother it was different.  It was a long series of those ice-cream moment decisions, but I remember them all this time.  My birthday is coming up next week.  He called me on my birthday last year.  It was the first time in, maybe 20 years??  He wasn’t sure he had the date right.  That’s fair.  I don’t know for sure when in April his birthday was.  I knew he was sick.  He had been dying for at least a year at that point.  That’s not what I remember, though.  What I remember was drowning.  My family has a way of interacting with me like I’m teen angst barbie. They needed me to be her when I was young so that they didn’t have to know I was suffering from severe PTSD and hanging on by the thinnest of threads.  If it was a phase, we would all survive it, annoying as it might be. Over the years, through real life interactions, callouses, and very consciously chosen by me times of contact, the interaction with this mythical version of myself has become bearable with my sisters and my mom.  What I heard in the message from my brother last year was the most distilled essence of it. It hit me like a wave and I couldn’t breath.  I remember it clearly.  I knew what he needed.  I knew he was dying.  I texted back a response that I could breath through.

 It was the last time I heard his voice.

 I missed both of my grandmothers’ funeral services.  The first, grandma Gallegos, because I didn’t know she had died (really close family), and the second, Nana, because I just didn’t want to go.  I’m sure I came up with an excuse, but I did not want to go.  I was a shitty granddaughter to her, for no reason, but I was.  Pretending that I wasn’t was more energy than I wanted to expend.

 Aaron was different.  I wanted to go to a funeral/ memorial/ something, just not the one on offer.  I had absolutely no interest in hearing stories about him as a child/ teenager.  I knew that Aaron.  Even if they glared at me, I wanted to hear about that time five years ago when… I wanted people who knew and loved the brother I didn’t know to memorialize the man he had become when I wasn’t looking.  It’s a very specific time period, too.  I want ten years to the last two.  Anything outside of that, fuck off.  In this imaginary group of people who knew and loved the brother I had given up on, I would offer as my only defense that I had written my thesis about the Vietnam war.  Of course, he didn’t know that.  He would have hated it.  He’s the only reason I known what Vietnam is.  I went there.  Before I gave up on him.  I bought him a “G.I.” lighter.  All the guidebooks tell you not to.  They haven’t been real in decades, and when they were they were a gross commodity by any estimation.  I knew what it would mean to him.   He was my big brother, and he put me on that path.

 He wanted to go to Thailand.  He would have hated it.  The toilet paper issues alone would have done him in.  The sun, though.  How he hated the sun.  He lived in Phoenix, though, so maybe he really was a different person. Selfishly, I didn’t want to find that out only to watch him die.  That he would ask me to tells me there was at least a little of the old Aaron left

 And the most ridiculous thing is the song “Malibu” by Hole makes me cry about his death like nothing else.  I have no idea if he even knew who Courtney Love is, but if he did I suspect he was in the camp that thinks she killed Kurt Cobain.  And a beach?  It’s just incorrect.  It’s like someone imagining my afterlife taking place in Connecticut.  I’m sure it’s a lovely place, it’s just wrong. But that’s where I see him.  He’s not even dressed right.  He’s wearing black pants, a cowboy shirt untucked, cowboy boots.  Maybe everyone is right.  Maybe I’m mad at him.

 “Take that, Aaron!  You’re on a beach for eternity.  Take that.”