I feel air being kept in my lungs. I can’t breathe. I read over it one more time, sadly I didn’t misread it. I read on and see that I was the intended target of the fire and the person who started it. They burned down my house trying to kill me. A wave of grief hit me. My family wasn’t supposed to die. I was.
Under that sheet was a paper from the mental hospital my brother is in. It listed the normal stuff age (19), height (6’5"), and stuff like that. It talked about how he never got any better, no matter what; he went through every therapy imaginable. The next thing I read made my heart stop. Depression and suicide. He became depressed because he didn’t save my parents. He thought I died in the fire because he didn’t find me in the house.
How could they have not told him! Did they want him to suffer? He thought he was the only Brown left, and no one told him differently. Why didn’t they tell him differently? I was frustrated. They are the reason my brother is dead! They might as well be the murderer of him in my eyes. The next page was his obituary.
Ethan Brown.
I feel the tears running down my cheek. My tears stain the paper. I’m the only one left. And I have nothing to show for it. My family died because of me. And look where I am now. So clueless, so stupid; I couldn’t even keep myself from getting taken. The next paper looks like a fairy tale story. It talked about demons and angels. They are mortal enemies, always attacking one another trying to have only angels or demons alive.
I look up trying to soak in all the information, all the things hidden from me.
"We usually don’t let people know this until we’re sure they’re angels." He says softly.
"Then how do you know I’m one?’ I say through my tears. Suddenly I feel like a little girl again; I just want someone to hold me while I sob. For a minute the room is coated in thick air as the silence fills me within.
"…The scars on your wrists…" he says quietly his voice fading. I wasn’t ready to talk to someone about them, not now, not ever. Especially not him, I mean who does he think he is bringing up something like that. And these scars by far do not make me an angel. They make me some ‘cunt who can’t handle the truth’. Was he making fun of me? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he is like the rest of the world. Maybe he’s here to make fun of me, to ‘try to help me’. I pull my sleeves down until I’m holding them in my hands.
"…It’s…It’s nothing, it’s not what you think" I whisper, we both know I’m lying through my teeth. I didn’t want him to know about my wrists. But then I see him pulling up his sleeves and he has scars too. Just like me.
