A Sort of Memoir

A young girl expresses her fears for her brother who has mental health issues.

In this cold place, I stare directly in front of me into the same green eyes I see each morning in the mirror. They are dilated, tired, and vacant. A long nose points down to a thin mouth, hanging slightly agape. Silent. A long sheet of black hair, curling at the ends--around the shoulders--is greasy and almost matted in its poorly-kept state. The air around us feels dry and foreboding as if the moisture--and the life--is leaving the room through some unseen filter. This man, hunched over and grey, is a stranger. I look up to the orderly, open my mouth to say so, then remember his eyes and shut it. I slowly move mine back down to his and lock on. I can’t turn off. If he weren’t wheezing in and out, slow, deliberate, breaths through his mouth, I might mistake him for a corpse. Memories seep from him and into my consciousness like a bad movie

We’re at the baseball park, telling everyone that we’re twins. We might as well be, despite the two and a half year difference. Fast forward. We’re in school together. We moved from public to private school because of his social issues, so I hover behind him at all times, ready to defend and protect him from anything and anyone. Fast forward. No. Rewind. He’s 10. He’s crying on the floor in our dark living room screaming that the demons in his head want him to do bad things. Fast forward. He’s eleven. A sixteen-year-old girl targets him, makes him her boyfriend, tells him that his family is keeping them from being together and wants to run away. Drugs and molests him. Threatens to kill herself if he breaks up with her. Fast forward. The Monster is gone for good. He seems to begin to recover. Fast forward. The night before his twelfth birthday, he makes his first suicide attempt. The doctors have been throwing around the word, “bipolar” and he’s been taking pills that are eating his young, tortured brain and he can’t do it anymore. Fast forward. He’s sobbing. Again. Because of what he’s put his family through. It’s pouring down raining in the dead of winter but he tries to run away on foot anyway. I follow, in just an orange sweater and shorts in the middle of winter and I hold on to his waist and try to hug him and pull him back at the same time for almost two hours until he finally hugs me back. Fast forward. Fast forward. Fast forward.

We’re here. I am an adult with a career and a family and a home and a life. My brother, hunched over in front of me, is perpetually the eleven-year-old boy who was ignored and shoved off and given s****y quick-fix remedies and who will never be the same again. He had so much potential and life and love to give, and it was taken from him. Torn from him. Not by his diseases, but by the people who refused to treat him with the care and attention that he deserved.

I am one of them.

“I love you,” I say. Because how are you feels painfully inappropriate.

He looks up slowly. It takes a long time for his eyes to focus, almost like a finicky camera lens. “Van?”

“Yeah, baby. I’m here,” I tell him, reaching a hand out across the table. He looks down at it but doesn’t respond to it.

“Savanna.” There’s a long pause. “How long has it been?” His tone is harder now. But, mostly, it’s dry and sad, and I want to cry.

“Too long, Leo. I’m so sorry.”

He grunts in response and his eyes roll downward, back to some empty corner of the room. That was it. No matter how I coaxed or nagged or pleaded, there would be no other response.

This is my worst nightmare; the one that keeps me up at night because I don’t need to be asleep to have it. It’s one in a long series of terrifying scenarios. I acquired them slowly, over the years. One for each new level of Hell I discovered that came along with my brother’s illness. They used to fit neatly into a small box, but they’ve since become the only structure in my head, like an enormous carousel. The music is sad and creepy and the attendant has fallen asleep and forgotten to turn it off. The riders are all nauseous and confused. I can’t escape them.

When I wake up, I dream that my brother has killed himself during the night. When I leave the house, I start to plan his funeral. When I get to school, I imagine what I might tell people at his eulogy. When I’m changing classes, I imagine him, 55 years old, moving into my house after our parents are both dead and he’s run out of other options. When I get to work, and I’m changing into my uniform, I can almost smell the week-old vomit he’s drowned in from an overdose--I can never decide if it was accidental or not. When a customer comes in who reminds me of him, I imagine him shuffling through the sick routine of a state-funded hospital. As I clock out, I imagine all the jobs he’ll have and lose and all the unfair rules and regulations and prejudices he’ll face. On the drive home, I wonder how hard it would be to be the one to find him and to have to tell my parents.

Not even when I get home to tell him about my day do I stop replaying the nightmares. Leo is probably my favorite part of my life. After everything that I have seen him go through, it’s no longer a question of whether or not I’ll lose him. Now, I just wonder how.