Wilde Fire

Chapter 3: Present

I am the only person who ever puts flowers on Ben's grave. I always knew this, yet as I fall to my knees in front of his headstone, the wilted white roses that I bought for him nearly three months ago only make me angry.

I understand why I am the only one who seems to care about him anymore, but it still hurts. He was my brother, the person I loved most in the world. He was always there for me, so I only find it necessary to continue being there for him, even in death. Despite my rationality, my parents don't understand why I come to see him so often; why I continue to grieve four years later. What they don't understand is how lost I am without him. It is as if we were the same person, and when he died, a part of me went with him. He is on my mind every second of the day, and each milestone in my life is a constant reminder of the milestones he never reached, the future he would never have, and the life he stopped living so early on.

I want so badly for my parents to understand, but they barely utter his name anymore. They claim it is just "too hard," though I know they are really just desperately trying to move on and forget him entirely. His death wasn't nearly as hard for them as his life was.

Despite the mistakes he made, I still love him, which is why my parents are constantly questioning my own mental health. I guess I can't blame them, though. After his death, I blamed my parents, instead of the person who was really at fault. I wanted to know what they did to make him so mad; what they could have possibly done to set him over the edge. Even to this day, I feel they played a part in it somehow.

A week after the incident by the river, the incident that left me with my awful scar, my parents decided that they had enough. On impulse, they checked Ben into the Riverside Psychiatric hospital, where the doctors performed several tests that I was scared to hear the results of.

I hated them for it.

I wanted them to believe that it was an accident, that Ben never meant to hurt me. I wanted everyone else to trust my brother and his judgment as much as I did, but that was almost never the case.

My parents said that they needed answers, and the doctors were the only ones who could give them what they needed. A week and a half later, Ben was diagnosed with a mild case of bipolar disorder and an extremely rare, impulse-control disorder that suddenly made everything make sense: pyromania.

When the doctors gave my parents and I the results of his tests, along with several prescribed bottles of antidepressants and biweekly visits with a therapist, our lives were turned upside down.

My parents were distraught. The little boy they had raised didn't turn out how they hoped, so it was as if they gave up on him before even giving him a chance to heal. They gave him life, but for some reason they were the first people who seemed okay with the possibility of it ending.

Ben didn't leave his bedroom for three days following his diagnosis. He was confused, which only worried my parents even more. He was hurt, because our parents had so suddenly pinned him as a lost cause, even though the doctors said that it was treatable. He was angry; at himself, at mom and dad, and at Kelby Blackwood for saying she loved him no matter what. Mostly, Ben was at a loss. He didn't know what to do or who to turn to. I waited patiently for him to talk to me, to let me know what was bothering him, just as he always did. I soon realized that I would be waiting a lifetime for this to happen. At the hardest point in his life, he chose to be alone.

And, gradually, Ben began to believe our parents. He was embarrassed. He began telling himself that he was crazy; that there was something wrong with him. Yet instead of taking the help that was offered to him, he only continued to do what he had always done.

After the heartbreaking diagnosis, Ben spent less time with Kelby and his family, and more time with his disease. He was obsessed with fire before, but it was as if he felt he had to live up to the label of a pyromaniac once the word was mentioned. I found empty liquor bottles in the trash can, piled on top of the receipts for lighter fluid and matches. Even when my parents tried to ground him, he would find a way to sneak out. I would never forget walking into the bathroom just in time to see him swallow a handful of the pain medicine I had been given for my burn, before slipping the rest of the bottle into his pocket and walking past me as if I wasn't even there.

One night, when he stumbled upstairs and into his bedroom, I crawled quietly out of bed and peeked my head through his door. It was the fourth night in a row in which he had come home hours after his curfew. "Ben?" I asked quietly, but he already knew that I was there.

He lay on the floor of his room, his eyes directed to the ceiling. Without looking at me, he spoke through his muffled tears. "I love you, Sid. You know that, right?"

I carefully stepped toward him. "I love you, too, Benny," I replied. I reached for his hand, but he pulled it away.

"Look at me, Sidney," he whispered. He sat up and squared my shoulders, and I stared into the face that I hardly recognized anymore. I tried not to look at the fresh scars along his palm and fingers; so noticeable, even in the dark. Ben's lower lip quivered.

"What's wrong?" I whispered back.

"I know that this has been hard on you," he said, "but I need you to promise me something. Okay?"

I stared at the sharp angle of his jaw, the ski-slope nose identical to my own. I never thought I could miss someone who lived just across the hall so much. I answered him with a nod.

Ben released my arm and pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked back at me with sadness in his eyes and then said the words that I, at the time, had not put meaning to: "When I'm gone, please don't feel sorry for me."

As I sit on the grass before Ben's headstone after my high school graduation, the words Ben spoke to me that night repeat themselves over and over again. I grab the wilted white roses, running my fingers along the jagged edge of the petals until they crumble into the grass. I should have brought him more, but a part of me hoped someone else had.

"I miss you, Benny," I say to him. It makes me feel better to talk, to tell him what I am thinking. Though it has been a long time since I've heard his voice, I still imagine his hearty laugh and how he would reply.

"You know," I begin, placing my graduation cap with the blue and white tassel over the grass where his head would be. "I wish you would have made it to graduation. You always told me you were going to set up a firework display, so that it went off right when you crossed the stage." I laugh at the memory.

He died six months before his own graduation. By the time May came around, his passing was still fresh on everyone's mind. My parents wouldn't let me attend the ceremony, even though I wanted to be there for Kelby. Despite my absence, I always wondered whether they had left an empty seat for him, which was the expected gesture after a classmate's death. I assumed they hadn't, based on what happened.

"I wish you could be here," I say again. He would have been so proud of me. I can only imagine what kind of graduation present he would have gifted me; most likely something to make me laugh.

Though the cemetery is quiet, I swear I can hear his voice, telling me that he will always be with me, no matter what.

"I know," I whisper, hoping that somehow he had heard me. I wipe my tears with the sleeve of my white robe and stare at the words engraved on the granite stone marking his burial spot. And, even as I remember how I had promised, I can't help but feel sorry for him.

BENJAMIN JAMES WILDE

JANUARY 30, 1992 - NOVEMBER 15, 2010

"REMEMBER SADNESS IS ONLY TEMPORARY.

THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS."