“For Christ’s sake boy, can’t you read?! It’s right there in front of you! Read it. Christ almighty. Read it, who am I kidding? You wrote it! It’s staring you right in the face. It’s been staring you in the face since you were sixteen. Sixteen for crying out loud! And look I get it, your life has changed. You’re different now and you’ve done some things. But you’re telling me that when you wake up in the morning and stare at yourself in that stupid little bathroom mirror you don’t feel the same damn way? You’re saying you’re all grown up and proud? Too damn proud to admit you’re the same brain in the same skin? Too damn proud. Look at you. You’re staring into that glass like you’re hoping a genie will come out. It’s empty. Christ. It’s empty, Red.”
I watched as he picked up my leather journal and flopped it open. He ran his thumb over his tongue and flicked through the pages. The gray of his beard stood out white beneath the amber bar light. He sighed; his head cocked back to peer through the lenses of his reading glasses.
“Right here. This one.” He laid a heavy finger to the page and plopped the little book back before me. “I read this when you were sixteen. Sixteen for Christ’s sake. You spell it out for yourself. Word for word.”
I stared down at the familiar script. Italicized like I always wrote. Handwriting, I adored and abhorred greatly. Swift flicks of the wrist that bared me exposed. Defenseless but free. You WILL die. Living is the choice. Death is inevitable.
Death is inevitable.
I tapped the pint glass on the walnut as I struggled. Every bone in my body ached to collapse upon itself. Every fiber of my being screamed. I wished, in that moment, to burst free from my body and leave it there a shell. I thought of the door and how quickly through it I would fly. How weightless I would be at last. But still I sat there contained. Trapped between my thoughts and a gaze that I could not bring myself to meet.
“Shit, Red.”
The silence that followed somehow ate through the stupidly poignant ballad drifting from the stereo speakers propped high upon the low-lit shelves. As if, somehow, it sprang from strings of ten thousand non-existent violins. Silence like a great wave. My hearing-aids hummed but it was silent in my brain. And we sat like that for a while – my brother, my pint glass and me.
“Look,” He said at long last, “I’m not trying to be a dick about this.” And I looked, finally, at my companion. I saw the age that had taken him. Age like mine. Age like the age that had taken our father and his father before him. I saw the lines about his eyes and the hollowness in his cheeks. “I just can’t stand hearing the same sorry thing over and over again.” He smiled. He smiled the same, broken-hearted smile he’d always smiled. And the irony of that smile hurt. The knowingness in it said more than the words he finished with. “Live, damn it. You’ve got it by inches left. Live. You never know what might happen. But Heaven on earth doesn’t exist.” He sat back and tapped the book again. “But you do. And people do. Hell, trees do. Live for nothing but the trees if you must. Cause you’ll be on your way before you know it. We both will. Hell, maybe we can go together.”
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