Our first mistake was falling in love. I realize that now, looking back. It was the glitch in our brains that made us fall for each other in those long gone days. Not that we could help it. We were helplessly, hopelessly, and woefully in love. And it was the worst mistake of our lives.
Our second mistake was thinking we could ever live our lives with this love.
We tried. We really did. We tried so damn hard. And it almost worked.
My brother and I grew up with our mother. We lived in a little farm way out in the middle of no where. I remember those days as warm and happy. They were the best of my life, a splotch of color on my gray and black canvas. Those were the days when my brother and I ran free in the fields, our little feet scraping on pebbles and scrunching in the cool green grass. Those were the days when we were the fish in the river, the birds in the trees and the gnomes between the rocks. The days when the country side was our kingdom and our imagination was as free and wild as the wind that tossed through our long blond hair. There was always laughter then. My brother, my mother, and I, we were happy.
Then my mother died. She fell ill, and her body withered and broke, turning gray and old in a matter of weeks. The doctor said it was cancer, but that didn't mean anything to me or my brother, we were to young to understand anything more than that your mommy was gone, and she wasn't coming back. After she past the two of us got transferred to an orphanage in the city. We stayed there for a couple of weeks before getting kicked from one foster home to another. Many of the places we stayed were horrible. The people who took us were often drunks, or desperate, or just not a right fit for the two of us. There were some nice places. Homes that were kind and loving, but those hurt almost more than the bad ones, because we knew they wouldn't last.
The year I turned sixteen was when we found the last foster home we'd ever stay in. It wasn't that bad. They were a middle age couple with a few grown up kids in college or something. The man was a junky who doubled as a part time plumber, but the lady was really quite nice to us. She would always try to give us what she thought we wanted, if she could manage to sneak it around her husband. I think she was trying to atone for something, like she thought that if she could do right by us, than maybe she could bare having wasted her life on her screw up marriage. I think she loved us, and we loved her too, but she would never replace the mother we lost.
That year my brother and I started at the same high school, he being a grade lower than me. Being the new kid is never easy, but it's harder when you smell like the black garbage bags you keep your cloths in, and your shoes are three years old and stitched back together a hundred times, and your hair is long and unkempt. That was the condition in which my younger brother and I entered your first year at a new school, in a new city, with a new family, and old, broken hearts. I got in a fight the first day, my brother got molested by a senior, and we both landed detention. Hey everyone, meet Ed and Al Elric, aren't they just awesome.
Hard was not a new thing for us, far from, but the promise of it lasting was.
Maybe that was what pulled us together so firmly. Maybe it was the cold nights in our tinny shared room, when he would curl up in my arms and cry into my shoulder. Maybe it was lunches we spent hiding from flying mashed potatoes, or the afternoons we spent running to catch the bus. Maybe it was the silent promise we had that we would make it no matter what. I don't know. All I know is that somewhere in there the nights of shivering from cold, and crying out the day's hardship became nights of searching lips and tangled limbs; nights of sobbing from pleasure rather than pain. I know that somehow the lunches behind the bleachers with paper bag meals became lunches under the trees with held hands, and small smiles. I know that chasing the bus somehow became slow walks down broken sidewalks to our house. I know that it was a horrible mistake.
We tried to make it work. We tried to hide it from the kids at school, the teacher looking down their long noses, the woman who loved us, and the man who beat us. We tried to overcome every obstacle set in our way. We tried, and we almost made it.
I never though it would end the may it did. I never though that brain dead druggy would catch us, or that he'd stick a needle in my baby brother's brain. I never even guessed that I would watch the person I loved slip away, cold blue fingers tangled with mine. I didn't think it would be so easy to find and purchase a gun at your local corner store. Shows how much I know.
But I think I've known this all along: it's just a pop, bang, and then it's gone.