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Every time a man yells I am 8 years old. I am standing in our kitchen and I am trembling. There are shards of glass around me and pain trickling down my face. Bright splashes of blood on the floor, astonishingly red. All that brightness inside me?
I wanted to be the cancer and not the soft feast of flesh.
Occasionally, I will visit the graveyard in my heart, knowing that he was buried alive. The love for my father died within my chest the first time he hit me. Mother insisted he did not mean it, yet I was only a child. I was his son. His fists were larger than my own head and he hit me.
He hit me.
No one dares to touch me now. I am tall, I am strong. To some, I am him. Merely a duplicate, the living copy of a man who caused immeasurable pain.
He lives inside me, the same way I lived inside him. A möbius strip, a snake always swallowing its own tail. Mutually assured destruction, maybe, or mutual deification.
Mutual consumption.
A dead man is inside my thoughts, my brain, he dictates my life even after his stopped. He ruined himself and he has decreed to ruin me too.
Yet, I slave away, to ensure that I never mirror my father in any way other than appearance. Sometimes, it works.
You are supposed to look up to your parents, they are your reason for being, the calculated creators behind your existence, however when your existence has brought you nothing but immeasurable pain, what gratitude is needed?
The flowers Lysander planted have begun to bloom, they are scattered around our house, the soil receptive only to his deft fingers. Mother Nature herself blessed my brother, he has a way with the decayed roots that no one else seems to be able to master.
Brother of gold, son of warmth, I would go to the ends of the world for him. I pray that it does not come to that.
We still share a room, it's overlooking the garden he worked so hard to build. The window is often open, Lysander loves fresh air, he is a boy of sunshine, the rays of light encapsulated inside his olive skin. Then there's me. I share his complexion but I am ice, my flesh frozen, the heat of a corpse.
I often complain about his head being halfway out the window, lost in the dreams his head makes up, he's always been like that, I suppose. Aerial, he is made of fire.
I would fight any war to assist his achievement of desires, his heart is currently encased by a girl. I have caught him sneaking looks, his gaze burns with love. It's impressive really, how a boy created by so much hate, has moulded into a beacon of adoration.
Lysander Abernathy is a man like no other, at only 14 years old he is the apple of my eye. He is in my heart and I suffer. Perhaps it is jealousy, no, it is loathing. I hate that he is subjected to the same cruelties as I, that his name is in again and again. And once I am free of the pool of death, he will still be drowning; I will be helpless.
