You can never say that he'll come back just as he left.

He may never come back.

He won't come back.

He may not be alive.

He's dead.

He's plain bloody dead. I lost my brother. I might've known before I had to be told. But I would have never listened to myself. That squeezing in the pit of my stomach when he left, something begging me to pull him back in the house and never let him leave again. My own brother, my own bloody brother. I have dreams where I wake up and it's all been a dream, he calls me again, he's alive. Such a cliché, right? I still don't think I believe myself quite yet. I can't quite grasp the concept that he's gone and it may have been my fault. I dream of being little kids again and we're playing in the park, laughing, eventually fighting, but laughing over it later. I dream of those Christmas mornings when he'd be the first to wake, and he could have just left me sleeping. But he woke me up so we could both see the tree in the morning. It's the little things you would have never thought to be so special. It's the little boy I saw dying in him as his body shook, begging for a fix. It's the pain I saw him go through, that all that time I had been denying the responsibility for, and then I just saw me, letting him walk away. He loved his music so much. I took it away... I took his life away...

My nose stung as I felt the tears coming on again. I cried when I saw my wife and daughter, I was so lucky to have them there. The front page featured the story of the plane crash, and a list of names of all the people on board, sixty or seventy something people, and my brother listed in tiny font among them. "Charlie Pace", as if just a factor. Just two words that meant nothing among all the rest. I wish I had kept him here, kept him safe. Locked up all the doors and windows and told him that he could never leave my life again and nothing could happen to him and I would fix all the pain I had put him through. I would fix it... make it all better, like what brothers are supposed to do... but he's gone. My brother is gone.