Sometimes, when it's raining, I like to sit in my car and watch the sky, listening to the raindrops pound on the glass of the front window. It feels like there's nothing in the universe but me and the infinite sky, and the rain on my windshield.
This time, I'm thinking about my childhood memories, all those bittersweet moments I had experienced when I was still figuring out who I was.
A lot of my memories have one thing in common— they're all memories I shared with Jackson.
Ah, Jackson. He was always the better brother, the golden boy of the family. The smart one, the talented one, the perfect one.
I'm a very jealous person— I always seem to want what I can't have. When I was a chubby eleven-year-old, I was madly jealous of Jackson, and his perfection. Mom and dad had always liked him more, despite them constantly telling me that they don't pick favourites. I couldn't blame them; Jackson had always been perfect— he was the top in all his classes, he was in most of the sports teams of the school (and even captain of a few of them), he was better-looking, sensible, poetic, creative, original. He was Jackson, I guess. There's no other way to explain him. He was perfect, and I was far from it.
While I would always be a homebird, Jackson was free, independent. Impeccably so. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, a free spirit at heart. Again, my jealousy was enough to turn me green. After all, what boy wouldn't be jealous of his flawless older brother? Definitely not me.
Don't get me wrong, I loved my brother and we were quite close, but there was always some resentment in me at his perfect life. He had everything— grades, friends, popularity, brains, girls. He would always take away what I had, no matter how unintentionally. Dad would always take him to baseball games instead of me, my friends always talked to him for hours when they came over and at one point, the girl I kind of liked (but mostly hated) had a huge crush on him. I guess everyone preferred him over the black sheep of the family, a.k.a me.
I remember that one time when I had come home on a particularly bad day. I was angry at my teacher, who was being unfair, my best friend, John, who wasn't talking to me all because I didn't bring a gift for his and his girlfriend's anniversary (I was always slightly resentful at the fact that he had a girlfriend and I didn't), and Carl Harrison, who was bragging and telling everyone that Anoushka liked him. Anoushka Sajati and I were always at each other's throats, and even though all of our friends constantly told us we would end up together, we ignored them— even though we both knew they were probably right (they were). Even though my eleven-year-old-self would never admit it, I was madly jealous. And it made me even more mad. It made my day even worse.
Now, if you were walking a along and you felt a raindrop fall onto your head, how would you react? Probably not much. You would maybe brush it off, and then go about your day. It wouldn't matter. But, let's say you felt fifty fall onto your head. Now, you would probably react a bit more. You see, this was a perfect metaphor for my problems that day; there would be one small problem after another, insignificant raindrops building up into a significant rainstorm.
I slammed the door to my house violently, and began to stomp into the kitchen, my soaked clothes dripping on the cream-coloured carpets my mom adored. The weather was in perfect synchronization to my mood; stormy and grey.
I slung my backpack onto one of the chairs by the table, and dropped into another. Then, I furiously unzipped my backpack and ripped out my homework, writing furiously. My messy scrawl was even messier than usual, and it was thick and dark, the result of pressing on the paper too hard. My pencil snapped, and I angrily snatched another one from my bag, grinding my teeth. After a few more minutes, that one snapped as well. I threw the halves onto the floor in frustration, paused, and then got up from my chair and started to stomp on the no. 2 until it was just a pile of wood chips. I stepped away, admired my work, and started to stomp on it even more.
That was when Jackson decided to come in. He took one look at me and said, "bad day?"
I glared at him.
"What does it look like?"
"Woah, calm down," Jackson said, raising his hands in surrender, arching a brow and giving me that look that he always gives me, the one that says, "calm down, you're overreacting and my hair is better than yours". Yeah, he said that once.
"I can't!" I yell at him, my voice cracking. It did that a lot when I was eleven; god, I'm so glad I'll never be able to revisit puberty. That was a dark time. "You don't understand, Jackson! Your life is perfect. You're life is so perfect, so how come I'm stuck with the shitty one?" My voice cracked again a few times, and my cheeks started heating up. All my life, I was like a ticking time bomb— staying silent while Jackson kept on outshining me and stealing my thunder, not speaking up about my boiling envy, and all it took was a few little bad incidents to lead me towards detonation.
Jackson's eyes widened and his brows arched. This was not in surprise, this was just a more pronounced version of that look.
"Life is hard," he said, smacking my forehead with his palm and earning an angry exclamation from me, "get a helmet."
"Hey!" I said, rubbing my forehead.
Then, he waltzed out of the room with a grace that only he had while I muttered profanities at his retreating figure.
I didn't know what his cryptic words meant at the time. I thought it was his way of saying that my life sucked.
"Life is hard, Talon," I mocked Jackson's smooth tones, though it was hard because my voice was an octave lower than his and was still cracking like crazy. "get a helmet, Talon." I glared at the door where he exited from.
Grumbling, I snatched another pencil and started to write my homework.
It was around seven years later when I found out.
There was rain on the cracked and bloody windshield, trickling down and diluting the crimson on the glass. A scream echoed in my skull, reverberating through my body. It was my own.
I remember hot tears streaming down my face, the feeling that my ribs were being squeezed tighter and tighter as I breathed. I remember feeling numb in my legs, as if I just faded into nothingness below my torso. I remember the shallow breathing of Jackson's matching mine. I remember.
I could barely recognize Jackson's bloody face, and it made the constricted feeling in my chest even worse.
"Talon," Jackson said, then started to cough feebly. My blood turned to ice when he coughed up red.
"Talon," he repeated, "life is hard. It'll be pretty tough without your—" he gives me a weak grin, "—without your awesome brother around to help you through. But you're strong... you'll figure it out." I found myself choking on my own tears, and I still couldn't feel my legs at all. At the time, I had no idea that I fractured my spine and would be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of my life.
But I could be seen as the lucky one.
He looks up at me with his wide green eyes. "Your helmet's still tough." He shifts his gaze, staring into the rain, and a single tear cuts through the blood on his cheek.
"Life is hard," he whispered, flashing a sad smile and smacking my forehead with a shaky hand, "get a helmet."
And in the wreckage of the car, in the rain and the blood, in the excruciating silence, Jackson closed his eyes.
And then I knew.
