Wearing My Smile | ✔

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Almost two months after your funeral.

I wasn't stupid.

If you were here, I'm sure you'd say I really wasn't. Which was why I didn't want to talk about my feelings, not if they had anything to do with you. Especially not about the way I felt about your suicide and where it left me, or how destructive you had been in the last couple of years which led to how destructive it turned me to be if I would’ve just see it from other people's point of view. People thought I didn't notice. That I was blind. That I couldn't see.

But I saw it clearly.

I could only imagine how difficult it must have been for them to tell me how toxic you had been throughout the years right then, almost two months after your funeral, with my wounds still raw around the edges because I kept on picking off the healing scabs. There was a certain unease in telling how bad someone had been for you when the person himself was dead. Suddenly it felt so terribly wrong.

Perhaps there was an unwritten rule to speak about a deceased person, especially if they were dead due to suicide: that you do not speak the bad parts, only the good parts. Such a bright and brilliant boy you were, they'd say because I was grieving. Altogether they forgave the fact that you'd been violent almost throughout your adolescent, as violent as the bullies who beat the shit out of me every a few days or so when Penny or Jay weren't around.

Forgotten was the boy of fourteen, punching another boy at school for touching him too roughly at one point after he'd warned them not to. Forgotten was the boy who punched his cousin in the stomach when they'd come over one weekend when he'd been fourteen, overwhelmed by jealousy from how normal they got to live their lives, how so unlike him.

Forgotten was the boy who'd wrecked his own room, splintered woods and shattered mirrors, upturned a bed and ruined shelves two months after the incident, crying and screaming so hard I could hear him from across the street. I ran there to find you crouching in your room, still shaking, still screaming like everything hurt you. Your mother was crying at the door, watching me, pleading me with her glistening eyes. But none of it was ever about her. Everything I did was always about you.

You only stopped screaming when I pulled you into my arms. It was awkward with your cast, mournful with how no matter how much therapy you'd do it would still shake and stutter. I walked into your room and I knew right away why you had been angry. It was the room you had been living almost your whole life, still looking the same even after you'd left it for good months ago to live with my family, untouched as if everything was the same—as if the only one who'd changed was you.

Forgotten was the boy who drank too much. You told me over and over you didn't get hangover headaches like other people. Alcohol calmed your nerves and helped you sleep, but there were nights you'd punch the walls until your knuckles bleed, nights where you'd scream at me to leave you alone, hit anyone who was too near.

Forgotten. Replaced by such a poor lonely boy in an abusive household.

There were riots for a while, did you know? People marching together to show their hatred of violence because of your death. I was there in the middle of it because it was related to my project. I was astounded for a while by how useless it was. A fucking march, as if it would you bring you back to life, but then I remembered my projects and I remembered it was not always about you anymore.

Some anonymous tips sent evidences to the police to pick up the case. Fuck knows where they'd gotten them. That was to say, to take your parents into jail where they should rot. But that didn't happen, of course, because a year after you started living in my house you'd told me again how reporting them would never work, so I wasn't surprised.

“Why?” I'd asked once when we were smoking on my back yard. It was always a gamble. Most of the time you wouldn't answer, or you'd explode then leave to cool off before coming back to apologize, but at that point I was so used to it I thought I had nothing to lose anyway.

“Some of Dad’s cousins work in the police dept. A great uncle in the higher ups, too. Not going to happen.”

“Oh.” Like it was nothing to me. Like it was normal. “So what do we have to do?”

You shrugged, taking a long drag of your cigarette then exhaled clouds of smoke into the night air. “Nothing to be done.”

I bristled at your nonchalance, but my voice was calm. “Don't you want him to pay for his crime?”

You looked at me with a small scowl. “Roo, he's my father.”

“Doesn't mean what he's doing was right!” I almost shouted. You were still watching me with a blank expression on your face. I wanted to yell at you then because you never seemed to understand that you were worth more than just a doormat he stepped on whenever he liked. And while you were already living with me then and he was never around anymore, a naive part of me still wanted him to pay, yet you didn't seem to understand.

You stubbed the butt of your cigarette off your jeans and flicked it at my face where it bounced back to the grass. No longer looking at me, you walked back into my house, saying, “Cool off for an hour before you get in with that vibe.” like you couldn't care less about your life or about what I felt.

I never told anyone this, but sometimes you were almost violently rough in our sexual activities. We were mostly experimental, being as inexperienced as we were in our seventeen. You were gentle sometimes. I knew I was always gentle with you because in my mind you were so frail that I was afraid I would shatter you. You hated that so much.

So sometimes when you couldn't stand me being gentle, you would sit on top of me, golden curls gleaming under the moonlight slipping through the curtains, moving up and down as I tried to stifle my groan. You were in control even as you preferred to bottom. I'd find your hands wrapped around my neck loosely, peering closely, as though wanting to see how I'd react. You'd asked once, “Aren't you scared, Roo?” Your hands wrapped firm enough to warn, but not to choke my breath. “It's going to be this easy.”

But I said to you, “No, Sam. You would never hurt me.” Then you'd release my neck as you kissed me like I was your air.

And you hadn't. You never did. At least not physically and not as permanent as after you'd decided dying was the only way to stop the pain.

I wasn't stupid. I wasn't blind. My vision had been clear the whole time. Even you had known how bad you were for me. That was why you left so much in the last few months before your death. Because you thought you were not good for me and you didn't know how to change, how to be better, and how to ask for help when you thought you didn't deserve it.

But, Sam, can't you see? I chose you anyway.