"...When someone you love passes, it's kind of tempting to remember only the good parts of them, the ones that make you think they were a perfect person. Their best characteristics and deeds are left behind and formed into their ghost. We knew each other at our worst, and we got through it. That was it. He was just a kid, and it wasn't fair. My only regret is that he didn't see me as a brother, but as this sort of being that watched over him. That was my fault. He did nothing. Goodbye, brother."
The man in the white shirt sat down in the front row and stared blankly at his brother's coffin. What did he do to deserve this? Why him? And what does he blame it on? Bad luck? Curses? Irony? His own bad parenting?
In Houston, Texas, there is a funeral of one.
In Houston, Texas, a man simply known as Bro Strider cannot find the strength to cry, but can bury his own brother.
A church organ plays in a funeral home as a young man lays to rest. A father is reduced to tears. People show up to comfort him, people that he barely knew, people that he knew too well.
"Though it was thirteen years ago he was given life, it is only recently that it has been taken away from him," he says.
His friend David gets up and walks with him to his car after the service. They drive to a cemetery not far from the funeral home, and the father watches in anguish as his son is lowered into the ground.
"David, tell me, was I a good father?" he asks. David can't answer. There is a silence. "I was never home, David, and I regret everything, I really do. I might've pushed him too far. I tried talking to him and all he would do was push it away. Every cake I made, every game I tried to play... Was it my fault? Was he assuming that I -"
"Jack, you're being too hard on yourself," David said simply, and put his hand on his friend's shoulder. David Brinner always had a way with words.
Empty bottles, empty heart.
The body of a girl is on the ground, covered in roses and dressed in sheets after sheets of purple fabrics. Purple was her favorite color. Her hair looks like she's running away into the wind, breaking through a barrier of slowly wilting flowers. She looks at peace, yet somehow still troubled. She was always a troubled girl. Her mother liked to think it was her lack of involvement. Or her excessive amount of involvement. She could never remember which.
Speaking of her mother, she's laying on the couch near the daughter. 7, 8, 9, 10 bottles of vodka sit open near her. This was only a little over the norm for her. All of the furniture had been pushed messily over for the girl to be arranged so neatly on the floor. The mother lay motionless. If her daughter were alive, she would have expected this.
Being a scientist, the mother worked day and night and produced results of great importance. Her lab is filled with all sorts of strange chemicals, vials, and tablets. A small canister that once held a few light greenish tablets was cracked open near one of the vodka bottles. Was it the round, light green one that cured hangover-induced headaches, or did it anesthetize its recipient?
She could never remember which. But either was fine.
Deep in the jungles of a little-explored island, there is a tree, and in this tree, there is a granddaughter. The vines hang around her, suspending her above the ground like a frozen moment in time. No one has come to retrieve her yet. Mostly because there's no one else on the island now; her grandfather was already dead before this day. So there she will sit, stuck in time, forever.
The first butterfly to alight was small and yellow. Then two, then three came.