#With these two chuckleheads and their separate turning out to be not great its like

[downfallofi]

Like, it's on my mind tonight because during family art, N played a Metallica song, and my brain made the cross connection of "Sad But True" >story about seeing Metallica in concert > I saw Metallica in concert last with RJ in like 2010 > thinking of RJ and how it's been a week since Adam told me he was going to jail and I haven't even processed it, haven't even really thought about it. I started to say something about it at the table tonight, but I got talked over, so I just shut up. It really is one of those things where stuff that's on my mind feels too big, my feelings about it feel hard for me to get out and don't sound right and anyway ain't nobody at the table doing art listening so I shouldn't burden them by spilling out my feelings about RJ and why hearing a Metallica song makes me think of him. Idk. As always, I don't feel like I have anybody that I can talk to, because as always, I don't feel like anybody should have to listen except me. It's just... Odd to turn over in my mind. Another "brother" relationship severed. I have had four brothers in my life, the two by blood and then Adam and RJ, and when Michael stabbed me in the back those first few times, Adam and RJ were the ones to take my hand, to look at me and say lemme tell you something, we are your brothers and we'd never do that to you. It is one of the closest times I've felt to being actually chosen in my life.

But of course, we drift, we get older, things aren't the same, even when I lived there things stopped being the same as we grow old and grow apart. That's life right? Sucks but, it's life for your friends, one you've known since you were like, 11 or 12 or whatever, to drift and have kids and have lives and become different people. But then you stop recognizing them at all, then they get progressively more shitty in their jokes and you start seeing that, good times when you were kids aside, you really kind of don't like who they are as people, right? And then the world just keeps going on, and they slide away, and you watch them from afar as they get into weirder shit. You move away, and the group chat dries the fuck up and their texts ring with abandonment, terse one word answers and Lol. And nothing else, saying shit like "so when you coming home". And you watch and like. You wonder what they're transforming into.

Idk it's something I turn over in my mind a lot, what happened to my brothers? One going full on mask off MAGA cult is bad, but then the other one has you asking if you knew all along just how... Deep his rage was, did you always know he had it in him to harm his son, was the excess drinking when you were in your twenties and it led to some fun drunk RJ stories really a sign, or was the rage always there? And now he's divorced and his wife takes their son, and his now ex-wife posts a lot of uncomfortable memes about domestic abuse, and you think over and over, RJ? No, dude, but yes. And time passes again, and now the dude is in real hot water, and his demons are eating him and he's put another innocent woman in danger, and it's just Jesus Christ, brother. What happened?

S'all a mess, like tangled Christmas lights, man. I don't know that I could have expressed these thoughts or unpacked just the latest development that RJ is now facing serious time at the family art table, in the midst of my sister and the youngest crabbing at each other. I don't even know why it hurts me, like I said. I need to remind myself a lot to leave them alone. They are not my brothers, they are harmful, I moved across the country because I was being constantly brought down by living somewhere I didn't feel myself. And yet.