PART 3: FOUR YEARS LATER

Wed., November 13, 2013
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The other night, I had the most unsettling dream.  Blake was there.  It turns out, he never died, he just disappeared. The darkness felt so real, and when he came back, I was hypnotized with happiness in being around my big brother again.  But soon silence filled our moments and I realized we didn't have much to say to each other.  It felt all too real.  A flashback to our time on this earth together and the extraordinary absence we had in each others' lives.  Soon I found myself frustrated with his behavior and the words that left his mouth.  The same feelings I had when he was alive.  I felt so torn between my happiness with his return into my life, and the resentment I felt

towards the person that he is.  And then an overwhelming anger towards myself for feeling any hostility towards him.  I tried to suppress any of these feelings and convince myself that nothing but warmth filled my heart.  I can't help but wonder what our relationship would be like if that car never killed him.  He has been such a defining part of my life since that day.  I emulate him.  I admire him.  I miss him every moment.  The person I am is stitched with the colors of his soul.  But, before he died our presence in each others' life was scarce.  I didn't like who he was or the way he chose to live.  And so I allowed my judgements to create a separation between us.  Would I still feel that way today if he were here?  When he died, he saved my life and destroyed it all at the same time.  I just wish I had a looking glass to peer into, so I could see what our relationship would be like today.  If his death is the only way we would ever become close, or if time and our own maturity would have created the relationship I always wanted between us.  In my dream, my wall was decorated in a mural of him.  Immortalized.  He surrounded me.  A constant reminder of pain. Excruciating, suffocating pain.  He saw this memorial wall and began to splatter thick black tar over the pictures.  He continued to cover these images of his life with blackness, until they were buried beneath the tar.  I was so angry at him.  So mad that he ruined these pictures that meant so much to me.  I sprinted from the house and kept running until I found a product ​​that would remove the tar.  I know that dreams are our subconscious' way of speaking to us, but I can't help feeling it was actually Blake that night trying to communicate with me through my dream.  I think he is trying to tell me, I need to let him go.  For the past 4 years he has been looking down on me and watching me live in the darkness created by his death.  By immortalizing him, and defining myself as the 'girl who lost he brother', I am keeping myself from living a full life.  I think he was trying to tell me that it is okay to let him go.  In keeping him so close, I am not free.  And he wants me to be free.  To live a full life not splattered in pain.  But, it is this pain that keeps me connected to him.  And I am so afraid that if I allow myself to move on from the grief, I will lose him.  I am terrified that if I let go of him, over time it will be as if he was never here to begin with.  That he will become a faded part of my past.  I don't want to forget him.  And I am so afraid that I will.  I don't want to have a life without him, and if I begin to build a world away from my sadness, well then it will be ​​as though he really is dead.  I have lived within my grief for 4 years, and I have no idea what the outside world is like.  I suppose I am in a perpetual state of denial.  I don't want him to be dead, and so I won't let him go.  I don't want him dead and so I keep him alive in my sad little world, and I can't live myself.  I'm just so scared I'll forget him, and forget the life I had with him and the person he was.  It just breaks my heart to think that he is dead, charred into pale gray ashes, and I get to continue on and live a full life.  One he isn't a part of.  I just don't know how to have a healthy relationship with my dead brother.  How to make him a piece of my life and not the all-consuming entity of it.  To accept the death of a loved one is the most difficult thing a person can do.  It breaks your heart all over again.  And so I must mourn the loss of defining myself as 'the girl who once had a brother'. Then, when that grief begins to secede, I can build a world that is pure, happy, full, unknown, which I am certain is what Blake wants for me.