Bryan: A Story of Loss and Redemption

Bryan and I had known each other our whole lives.

Only three days my elder, our parents found it convenient to take turns babysitting the two of us while the others got a break. We grew up doing everything together, sleeping, eating, bathing, playing. Each of us was the other's second half, inseparable, like conjoined twins sharing one heart.

When we started kindergarten, we we placed in separate classrooms. We both threw the most awful tantrums for a full week of school, screaming furiously in our shrill voices, refusing to heed the demands of our teachers. Finally they agreed to place us together, more to ease their own headaches than out of compassion.

We grew. Most people thought we were fraternal twins, as we shared a last name and both possessed identical blue-gray eyes. We found this amusing and allowed them to think this, though really we were just second-cousins. We often referred to each other as brother and sister.

In personality, however, we couldn't have been more different. While I was a quiet little mouse of a girl, preoccupied with schoolwork and never questioning authority, Bryan was a rebel. He was constantly being reprimanded for blowing off school assignments and talking back to teachers. People always wondered about our unlikely duo, the teacher's pet and the teacher's nightmare, inexplicable best friends.

But when we were alone together, our personalities melted into each other, mixing like blue and red to make purple. I had a secret passion for hard rock music, a stark contrast to my general good-girl aura; Bryan, the slacker, had a hidden love for history, and would spend hours perusing dusty old books about Cleopatra and General Patton. Only I knew about Bryan's intellectual side, and he my rebellious side.

No pair of friends was ever closer than we were. We completed each other, our opposites canceling out to form balance. We were at peace with the world and very happy with one another's company, and we thought it would stay that way forever.



And then, everything changed.

When we were twelve, Bryan's father was shot and killed by an Afghan soldier.

The news of his death was a shock to everyone. Bryan and I sat crying together for hours, until we ran out of tears and could only whimper quietly, our arms around each other tightly. Bryan's mother say watching us, dry-eyed. Her face frightened me. She looked like a statue, so still and pale. Her hands quivered, but not a tear escaped her eyes.

I had never been to a funeral before. We entered the church together, Bryan with one hand holding mine, the other holding his mother's. Her hand was limp in his. She walked beside us mutely, eyes staring straight ahead, face white as paper.

I was deaf to the eulogy. I kept looking at Bryan, tears spilling down his cheeks in twin rivers, then at his mother, stiff and without a hint of emotion. Something was very wrong. I didn't know what to do.

After the funeral I told my parents I was worried about Bryan's mother. They said she was just in shock. She would begin to grieve when she was ready.

But she didn't grieve. Not once did I see her cry, or even glimpse a trace of sorrow on her perfect porcelain face. She looked like some inanimate doll.

They say you can't heal until you mourn. Bryan's wounds were bandaged by his tears, but those of his mother were left open to fester in the murderous air, infecting her with tiny ravenous viruses that devoured her from the inside out. Two months after her husband's untimely death, Bryan's mother took her own life.

When they told me she was dead, it was like a slap in the ace. I'd known something was wrong, and I hadn't done enough to save her. The thought of facing Bryan with this torturous knowledge was agonizing, but I couldn't bear to leave him by himself at a time like this. In just two months, he'd become an orphan.

I was expecting him to weep for hours, like he had when his father died, but instead I was horrified to see him dry-eyed and stone-faced, utterly numb and emotionless. Just like his mother.

Hysterical, I sobbed onto his shoulder in violent anguish, as if my
tears would coax his to the surface, but he just sat in silence, his eyes glued to the floor, as my tears soaked his shirt.

The second funeral filled us all with a maddening deja-vu, seeming to mock out pain with its sick humor. I slipped into my black dress for the second time, too miserable to even glance in a mirror.

Bryan's door was closed and silent. He didn't respond to my knock, so I entered quietly. He was sitting on his bed, back arched downward, leaning forward with is elbows resting on his knees. His face was buried in his hands, tearless, and his body quivered as if from cold. He was nude but for a pair of boxers, exposed and vulnerable.

Like a mother caring for a child, I pulled his suit form its hanger and began to dress him. It looked brand new, but we both knew it had been worn once before. Gently I eased him into his shirt, jacket, pants, tied his shoes, fiddled hopelessly with his tie. I ran a hand through his tangled mop of hair, trying to brush it out. He sat in silence and allowed me to take care of him, his eyes dull and distant.

Seeing him at the funeral terrified me. It was like he had become his mother, and the old Bryan, who cried and mourned and healed, was lying dead beside her corpse. My tears were more out of sheer terror at the expression on his face than sorrow for my aunt's death.

After the eulogy, the casket was left open for us to see her body. She looked at peace, like she was only asleep in her satin-lined bed. Her serene expression brought a sudden surge of rage to me. What right had she to be at peace, when she had been too weak to stay alive for the sake of her son? Why was she happy, when she had abandoned her only child to fend for himself in a hellish existence? I nearly spat on her lovely face.

Bryan was sent to live with his father's sister, Claudia. I begged my parents to let him stay with us, but Claudia was in the process of adopting him, and I was told it was best for him to stay with the woman who would be raising him. When I helped him pack it was like I was sending him off to war. In a way he was already gone. He'd barely spoken to me or anyone else since his mother's death. He was slipping away.

His aunt lived several miles away. It was at best a forty-five minute bike ride from my house. Whenever I could I'd bike over there to visit. Bryan and I talked without speaking, muttering meaningless statements about school or the news.

His physical appearance had changed dramatically. He'd lost at least twenty pounds, though he'd been thin to begin with. His face was pale and sick-looking. Even his voice seemed quieter.

What scared me the most was his disquieting lack of mischief. He'd been an orphan for three months, and in that time he'd gotten no detentions, no calls home. He was bringing home straight A's for the first time in his life, yet his beloved history books sat ignored under his bed, covered in a layer of dust.

As we blathered on about nothing, I began to wonder who would be the first to lose control, to not be able to take our ignorance of the obvious any longer.

It turned out to be me.

I had greeted him, as always, by asking how he was, and he answered, as always, “Fine.” But I looked at the boy sitting beside me, the boy who looked underfed and sickly and in utter misery, and I knew he was not fine. I snapped.

“How are you really?” I demanded, more angrily than I'd intended.

Bryan looked up in surprise. For the first time in months. he looked right at me, straight into my eyes, and I could see straight into his, like a pair of windows to his soul. What I saw was total panic. Help me, his eyes seemed to plead desperately. Save me from myself. I'm weak and I'm slipping, soon I will fall. You've got to save me.

“I'm fine,” said his voice; “I'm dying,” said his eyes.

No words can express the acute frustration and despair I experienced in those following days. Everyone I pleaded with told me the same thing: It's to be expected. He'd just lost both of his parents. He won't be the same for a long time. Just let him grieve in his own way.

But why couldn't hey see that he wasn't grieving at all? I begged them to get him some help, to which Aunt Claudia replied tartly that he'd been attending grief counseling every other week and was making good progress. Oh, how could she be so blind to the truth that he was following in his mother's footsteps? How could they all be so blind?

Driven to hysteria by the terrible knowledge that no one would help me, I begging Bryan to open up, to give me a glimpse of his internal struggle, to just let me help him. Hours I spent pleading with him through miserable tears to tell me what was happening to him. His mask of apathy never wavered. All the while, the boy beneath the mask was withering away.

And then, my worst fears were realized, the paralyzing terrors that
left me praying to a God I didn't believe in to make it not so.

On a day when I biked over to Bryan's house, no one answered the door.

A feeling of crippling dread wrapped its blackened fingers around my heart and squeezed. Hands shaking, I managed to get the door open with my spare key. I called his name loudly. No answer.

Starting to hyperventilate, I stumbled wildly through the house screaming for Bryan, searching every room for him. The door to his bedroom wouldn't budge. There was no lock; something had been shoved in front of it to keep it shut.

Panicky tears overflowing from my eyes, I began to ram the door with my shoulder, bashing at it again and again as the door inched open with agonizing slowness. With a painful pop my shoulder dislocated from its joint and hung limply, badly bruised.

Ignoring the pain, I turned and used my other shoulder, cries of strain escaping my throat as I struggled to move the door's mammoth weight.
Finally, I pried it open just enough to manage to squeeze through. With a gasp of effort I forced my way into the room.

And there he was.

He looked like a rag doll, so alien and grotesque as he hung limply, rotating slowly, obscenely. A rope dangled from the ceiling fan with Bryan's throat clasped tightly in its murderous grip. A stool lay kicked onto its side, out of reach.

And oh, the blood. There was so much of it, everywhere. The noose was stained deep crimson, and his entire upper body was soaked in dark red from where the rope had bitten harshly into his skin. His lip was bitten nearly in half, and his arms and face were crisscrossed with deep scratches, clawed desperately by short-bitten fingernails. The blood oozed in gruesome red rivers down his body, down to his toes and fingertips, where it fell in small twirling drops down to the carpet, forming a crimson stain below him.

I realized I was screaming. I tried to stop, but the obscene noise just kept flowing from somewhere deep and primitive within me. I stood there completely paralyzed and shrieking like someone who's come unhinged, while the blood continued to drip from Bryan's motionless body.

And then the paramedics were there.

I don't remember calling and ambulance. I don't even remember ceasing to scream. How long did I stand there, alone with Bryan dangling there, grotesquely limp, his blood drenching the carpet, while I waited for them to arrive? Five minutes? Ten? Was it a lifetime I spent in that crimson-soaked room?

When the arrived I was deaf to their chaos. I felt my shoulders being grabbed as I was hustled out of the room, numb to what must have been searing pain from where my shoulder was dislocated. I saw mouths opening and closing as if to yell but heard no sound. The images passing through my field of vision began to blur, fade. Then darkness.

When my eyes opened, a plastic cup was pressed to my lips, and a voice was ordering me to drink. Obediently I swallowed the water. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. My body shook uncontrollably. “Bryan,” I heard myself murmur dazedly.

The voice hushed me soothingly and wiped sweat from my forehead. “Keep drinking your water.”

My eyes darted around in terror. “Where is he? Bryan...” I moaned, starting to stand but then growing dizzy and collapsing back into my chair.

Hands appeared to stroke my hair comfortingly and urge me to stay seated. A nurse explained softly that Bryan was in critical condition and on his way to the hospital. He'd tied the noose incorrectly, so instead of tightening around his neck it just cut the skin. He was still alive, but only just.

I don't know how long it was before a doctor told us that Bryan was in stable condition. I felt as if I'd aged decades since I found his front door locked.

I asked if he would fully recover. The doctor said the chances were good. Relief filled me up like warmth, melting me into my chair. The pressure built up inside Bryan had been released . Now he could get better. Things could go back to the way they used to be.

When I was finally allowed to see him, my excitement bubbled over and spilled out around me. I'd missed the old Bryan. Now we would be reunited. I ran at a full sprint to his room.

His aunt stopped me at the door. My smile collapsed when I saw her face. “What's wrong?” I asked her.

She told me he wasn't the same person as before. “He's changed,” she said, her voice unsteady. “A piece of him is gone. The doctor is going to do a CAT-scan to check for brain damage.”

Brain damage. The worlds sat flatly on my skin, refusing to sink in. I nodded to Claudia and pushed past her into the room.

Bryan lay on the bed, eyes closed, his chest rising and falling gently beneath the blanket. Quietly I sat in a chair at his bedside and tenderly took his clammy hand in mine.

His eyes opened, and slowly his head turned to face me.

“Hi,” I whispered, starting to get teary-eyed at seeing him alive.

He didn't answer. The cuts on his face were bandaged, but I could still see his eyes. The looked glazed over, unfocused, like he wasn't really seeing me. And there was something terrifying about those eyes. They no longer resembled mine. There was something wild, insane, almost feral, like looking into the eyes of a crouched wolf, waiting in ambush for prey.

“Bryan,” I said quietly, my voice high and weak. His lifeless eyes were no different than those of a corpse. They were eating into me, ravenous worms burrowing deeper and deeper into my mind. I couldn't look away.

I became aware of a feeling of discomfort in the hand which Bryan
was holding. He squeezed tighter, and a sharp pain flared to life. I cried out in surprise. His eyes stayed locked on mine, his face emotionless.

Snap. I gasped from the pain as my finger broke at the knuckle. A nurse who had been sitting across the room jumped up and rushed over to the bed. In the two seconds this too, Bryan broke another one of my fingers. I screamed in pain and terror.

The nurse tried to pry Bryan's hand off of mine, but it was clamped on tightly. In the struggled to separate us, a third finger broke as well. Finally the terrible squeezing stopped the nurse wrenched Bryan's hand from mine. I gaped at my hand, three fingers dangling at gruesome angles, one bent completely backward. I wailed in horror.

My fingers would later heal. The scars of my memories never would.

More soon. Comments welcome.

The CAT-scan showed that parts of Bryan's brain had shut down, as if he'd had a stroke. Among them was the part where memories are stored. The part where emotions are generated. The part that separates us from animals.

The Bryan I had once known was gone.

It was all a blur. One day they were explaining how, with a lot of therapy, Bryan still stood a good chance of making a full recovery.

The next, he was being admitted into a mental asylum.

Life was a lucid dream. Through a window I could see him sitting on the edge of his bed, eyes glued to the wall, as if there was something fascinating there that only he could see. He never spoke, never smiled or showed any kind of emotion. His body was a casket for his murdered soul. He was a vegetable living in suspended animation, waiting for the death that had already claimed his mind.

After he broke my fingers, Bryan was classified as dangerous and moved to a more secure room with reinforced door and windows. My visits had to be brief and closely monitored. I would just look down at his walking corpse and choke on my own self-loathing, for not being able to save him.

Oh Bryan. I'm so sorry.




My father was ordering me to eat.

Before me sat a plate of fettuccine alfredo, my favorite food. A rank stench like that of sewage wafted into my nostrils. The noodles gleamed revoltingly; the chicken looked gray and moldy.

“I'm not hungry,” I murmured, and it wasn't a lie. My stomach felt sickeningly bloated, though I hadn't eaten in two days.

“You'll eat at least half of that,” my father said firmly, like I was a stubborn five-year-old. He sat down across the table from me.

I stared down at the revolting pile of slop and noodles. How could I have once loved this slime? It reminded me of sauce-covered leeches.

My father kindly offered to make me a sandwich, seeing my nose wrinkle at the sight of the pasta.

I shrugged noncommittally. I didn't want a bite of any kind of food.

A tuna sandwich was placed before me. My father told me it was made with extra vinegar, the way I liked it. Yet I was revolted by the sight of the obscene food. I repeated that I wasn't hungry.

My father sat down and folded his arms. It was clear that neither of us was leaving the table until I had eaten.

With painful reluctance, I picked up the sandwich and raised it to my lips. For a split second I could swear I saw maggots squirming around among the mayonnaise-coated tuna. Then I blinked and they were gone.

I sent my father a final pleading look. He waited in firm silence.

My face scrunched up in a disgusted grimace as I, very, slowly, opened my mouth and took a tiny bite.

Oh, how can I describe in mere words the awful taste that filled my mouth? It was bitterly salty like tears and sweat, metallic like blood. But there was more than that, for it just tasted inexplicably but undeniably wrong. It was the taste of urine, of feces; it was the taste of raw human flesh, freshly hacked from the bloody bone.

The revolt I felt was so overpowering that it seized control of my body. I spit the bite I'd taken onto the floor. My stomach churned and tried to vomit, but there was no food inside it, and I could only gag. I fled ashamedly from the room.

Food was my enemy. It was constantly being pushed at me, the smell nauseating, the taste utterly unbearably when it was forced into my mouth. Yet I could feel no hunger. It was like food was just a luxury I'd once been blessed with, but now had been rejected by my undeserving tongue.

I barely noticed that I was dying. MY skin became so drained of color that all my veins were clearly visible. The little extra weight's I'd possessed fell away, leaving only bones. My ribs jutted out jaggedly, and every bump of my spine was taut against my sallow skin. I looked like an alien, gaunt and deformed, my eyes appearing too large for my head.

My parents were in a panic. They forced me to come to the hospital, where the nurse took one look at my emaciated figure and ordered me hooked up to an IV.

I resisted; I don't know why. I wasn't afraid of needles. I suppose my mind was so cloudy from the malnutrition that I didn't fully understand the fact that I was starving to death. They ended up having to restrain me. The sight of her perfect daughter in a straightjacket brought my mother to tears.

After trying to escape the hospital several times, I was transferred to the mental ward. I threw a temper tantrum like at toddler, screaming that I didn't want to have to sleep with the lunatics. My protests were ignored.

My room was shared by an anorexic girl named Elaine. I guess they thought I'd be able to relate to the vain blonde cheerleader who starved herself because she thought she was fat. I was insulted that they thought we were alike. I wasn't anorexic, and I didn't think I was fat, I just hated the taste of food. Just watching another person eat was disgusting. And the constant stench of Elaine's vomit wafting in from the bathroom didn't help my nausea.

The ignorant nurses always brought us plates heaped high with food they'd made special for us, twice the quality of what was served in the cafeteria, as if that would make us want to eat it. I sometimes swallowed a few mouthful of the revolting food, more to see if any flavors were tolerable than for any other reason. I left the rest untouched to be devoured by flies.

Elaine could never seem to make up her mind as to whether she wasn't to eat the food and vomit it back up or just avoid it altogether. Usually she settled on the former. She'd often scarf down my meal as well, then wail angrily at me for letting her.

My therapist carried the rather unfortunate name of Dr. Moody. He was a portly middle-aged man with a shiny bald head and huge thick glasses. He liked to talk to me about seemingly-innocent topics while secretly trying to worm his way into the riddles of my subconscious. I quickly grew tired of humoring him. His frustration that I kept resisting equaled mine that he wouldn't leave me alone. We made little progress.

I also was forced to attend weekly group therapy sessions. Since there was no one in the hospital with my particular issue, I was placed in an eating disorder support group, where a circle of scrawny females blubbered on about how they all felt so fat while going through box after box of Kleenexes. I didn't talk much, listened even less.

All the while, I grew thinner, weaker. The clothes that had once fit me now hung loosely form my bones. My hands were skeletal like an old lady's, and around my cheeks and eyes the thin white skin sunk in and formed shadows.

My strength seeped slowly out of me. It became difficult to even cross a room, and later I would become unable to support the weight of my own head, like a newborn infant.

It was when I reached seventy pounds that my hair started falling out. It lay on my pillow like a shimmering crown around my head. Just running a through fingers through my hair pulled free long thick locks of chocolate brown. This was the first time I felt real remorse for what was happening to me. Though I'd always complained about my untameable mop of hair, seeing it blow away from me and float down to the floor brought a feeling of real loss.

I covered my sorrow with bitterness. I'd look around at me room's linoleum floor, now starting to resemble that of a barber shop, and tell myself that this was what I deserved for not being able to save Bryan. And at the sight of my family's tears, I thought spitefully that they deserved this suffering too, for not listening when I begged them to help him. Our hellish life was a just punishment for our sins.

One day, I returned form therapy in my wheelchair to find the bed next to mind empty. I asked the nurse where Elaine was.

She looked surprised. “No one told you? oh, sweetie, Elaine passed away earlier today. I'm so sorry.”

The shock was profound, shaking me to my very core. In group therapy, it wasn't unusual for some of the girls to suffer drastic relapses, or show up with their wrists crisscrossed in straight red lines, or even on occasion make a halfhearted suicide attempt, more for attention than anything else, but none of them ever died.

Elaine was five feet, eight inches tall and a mere sixty-seven pounds when her emaciated body found it could continue to starve no longer, and her organs began to shut down. She died within minutes.

My mother was surprised when I told her I wanted to attend Elaine's funeral. It wasn't as if we were friends; I'd always considered her more a nuisance than a companion, the whiny cheerleader in the next bed who always smelled of vomit. But I felt it was my duty to go, if only as a small token of apology for not treating her more nicely in life.

The funeral was two days after her death. Those were the first two nights I'd slept in an empty room at the hospital. Without Elaine's oddly-comforting wheezy breathing filling the silence, every little sound was deafening. I could hear the nurses chattering in their bird-like voices, a guard's footsteps moving up and down the empty hallway, the occasional scream like that of a tortured beast as someone awoke from a twisted slumber. For the first time since I'd been admitted into the mental ward, I felt frightened.

My mother dressed me in the same black dress I'd worn to the funeral of Bryan's mother and father, a lifetime ago. How would the dress look so unchanged when I was a stranger to who I'd been when last I'd worn it?

As I sat unclothed in my wheelchair, I saw my reflection in a mirror across the room. I tried to tear my eyes away from the disturbing image but could not summon the strength.

I nearly didn't recognize myself, so different was I from the last time I'd peered into a mirror without the hospital gown covering my gauntness. I was apalled by the obscene and hideous atrocity staring back at me. Not a wisp of hair remained on my entire body, not even my long dark eyelashed, which other girls had always admired. The skin was gray and dead-looking and lined with dark blue veins, hanging loosely across my skeleton like a stretched-out sweater, disgusting flaps of it dangling from my body everywhere. My stomach was a cavern, my waist so tiny I could nearly wrap my hands all the way around it. My sunken eyes glared out like those of a corpse. I looked into the mirror and was face to face with death.

The end is near, said a tiny voice deep within my mind. I didn't know whether to feel remorseful or relieved.

The church where the funeral was held was decorated with countless photographs of Elaine, who now lay stiff and ice-cold, hidden beneath her coffin's heavy lid. I was shocked by how beautiful she once had been. The bitter frown I'd always known her to wear was nowhere to be found in the pictures, only a radiant white smile. Her wispy strands of fair hair were now gorgeous golden curls that tumbled down her shoulders like a honey waterfall.

The pictures showed the true Elaine to me. No longer was she a dingy pile of bones but a stunning beauty, her figure verging on a model's perfection. She had long tan legs attached to gently curving hips. Her stomach was flat and athletic-looking, and before my very eyes I saw the flat-chested girl I'd known at the hospital transformed into a C-cup beauty.

I couldn't imagine how such a radiant girl had been driven to utter despair. Surely she'd gotten all the friends she could ever want, and could make any man who she deemed worthy fall in love with her. How could her life have fallen to such ruin?

I pulled my coat tighter around me, shamefully hiding my emaciated body, suddenly self-conscious about my bald head. I didn't want the others to know that the beautiful blonde posing in the photos now looked like me, hideous and disfigured.

It was late by the time my mother wheeled me back into my hospital room. Tiredly she helped the nurse to undress me and lay me down on my bed.

“Do you need anything before you go to sleep?” the nurse asked me, heading for the door.

My mouth opened automatically to answer No as I always did, but suddenly I stopped myself. “Actually, yes,” I answered slowly, tasting the strange words in my mouth.

For a moment I almost changed my mind and sent her away. But then I glimpsed from the corner of my eye the disturbing starving body to which I was attached, glimpsed from the corner of my mind the photographs of a beautiful girl with long blonde hair, and suddenly the words breathed out form my mouth with a resolute firmness I hadn't heard myself use in ages.

“I am hungry. Bring me some food.”

The recovery process was slow and painful. My first meal consisted of a thin watery broth. The poor state of my shrunken stomach, coupled with the awful taste like that of urine flooding my mouth, so bitter and ammoniacal, caused me to promptly vomit it back up. It took several more tries before I was able to keep anything down.

The taste of each spoonful was viler than the last, each mouthful possessing a uniquely-revolting flavor. One would be identical to the taste of blood, the next a bite of black dirt, the next tasting the way animal dung surely would, judging by the smell. It was like my tongue was throwing every sensation it had at me to get me to stop eating the deadly poison.

But with agonizing slowness, I felt the disgusting tastes begin to subside, until finally I started tasting the food's real flavor. It was like reuniting with a lost lover, to remember how amazing food truly was. I chewed each bite slowly, savoring the glorious sensation for as long as possible before finally swallowing it down, then going back for more.

Around the time I was able to eat full-sized meals once again, my hair started growing back. The joy I felt when I awoke to find tiny dark stubble emerging from my puckered scalp's rejuvenated follicles was unlike anything else. I nearly cried happy tears when I got to shave my legs once again, a nuisance transformed into a blessing.

Later, feeling confident, I decide to walk the entire length of my room without help. I barely made it back to my bed, exhausted with bony legs aching dully. How I wanted to be free of my wheelchair each day, but it took many, many tedious hours of difficult physical therapy before I was able to walk again. When I finally felt I had remastered the art of walking I attempted to triumphantly flip the rickety old chair upside-down, but my arms were still feeble and I struggled under its weight. My physical therapist kindly helped me to overturn the monstrous contraption which had once mocked me. I posed with one foot on the chair like a hunter over his prized kill.

Of course, my recovery was not complete, as some permanent scars of my sickness would never heal. The strength of my bones had been severely depleted as my starving body resorted to a sort of self-cannibalism in order to survive, rendering my skeleton as frail as that of a much older woman.

But I couldn't complain. I was alive, and that in itself was more than enough.

And yet, although my body was healing, my mind had contracted a disease far deadlier than the most potent virus, and a black rot was slowly decaying my brain from the inside out.



I hadn't seen Bryan's face in nearly a year. My parents had long since forbidden me from visiting him. I needed to move on, they said. To forget.

Forget––such a wistful thought. Oh, to just forget it all, to delete all the torturous memories that clawed into my soul all day and night without rest. If they could just float away in the wind, like tissue paper.

Maybe it was all just a dream, an awful, terrible dream, a sick joke from God, a God who didn't exist yet had damned me. Maybe there was no Bryan, no blood that dripped in fat red drops from his limp fingertips, no blank lifeless stares like the eyes of a petrified fish, no agonizing guilt crushing me slowly like a skier trapped beneath an avalanche. It was all in my head, a disease, a worm. And all I had to do was to flush it out.

No suffering.

No Bryan.

Only emptiness.

More soon.