Of Comedies and Tragedies

Part 1 - Sorrowful Stories

I hate comedies.

I hate tragedies.

I like sorrowful stories that sadden you to the bone. These are not of life and death, love and missed chances. But of sadness of waiting in vain. Not the kind when someone was stood up. It is of waiting in spite of knowing no one is turning up, even when the rains chills you deep down inside, you keep on waiting, waiting for someone or something you don't know. You only know you have to wait, even if it takes you a long, long time.

I always waited at the bus stand opposite my school watching the students rush out like massive flow of avalanche. It was where I always sat quietly waiting for my parents to take me home after picking my brother up from the other side of the town. It was an hour's wait before their car came flying down to a halt in front of me. I had not mind the wait. I was the older brother. Six years I had been the centre of their universe. He had to share the attention ever since.

I was barely sixteen when they stopped taking me home. I did not know who stopped to turn up first. Perhaps I returned home on my own before their car arrived. Or perhaps they told me not to wait for them anymore. I don't know. My brother told me they still passed by the bus stand I used to wait for them every single day he was driven home.

On my seventeenth birthday, they couldn't pass by the old bus stand anymore.

I got home early that day, took the car and picked my brother from school. We didn't speak. I drove all the way to Granny's house like the people told me to. It was the same city in which her house was at, but the distance couldn't seem to be much further away.

Granny had only one spare room that we had to share. But the room couldn't seem any bigger and our belongings could hardly fill the area. We could probably never be able to too.

I was seventeen when I drove their car for the first time. Seventeen when I saw the sceneries that passed by in black and white. Seventeen when I first held my brother and cried in his arms. Seventeen when my future ceased to be what it could be. Seventeen when I had to keep it all in me as their coffins were lowered six feet under the ground. The voices of condolences slipped by me. Like in those old movies, their mouths were moving but everything was ringing in silence, they were all in shades of grey. I couldn't see any color. Granny sobbed in her living room, holding my brother in her arms. But, still, there was no sound.

I was back in school two days after the funeral when I was acutely aware of their stares. Form teacher to unfamiliar teachers, schoolmates to close friends. Their sympathetic eyes followed my shadow everywhere.

I quitted school the following year. Started working, running errands, doing odd jobs for the money. The trust fund would wear off eventually. We need money to run on. Time spent away from home got more and more. The days started to get endless and the shades of grey coloring the city still wouldn't go away. And then one day, I lost track of my future.

There was a place I passed by that day, throbbing away in the night. Loud music drowned my buzzing silence. Warm bodies rubbing against me, flashing lights wailing throughout the place. We drank the night away and shot up in the back alley. It was the first time, after such a long time, I could see colors. I was hooked. I couldn't turn back anymore.

Reality hit me hard after the death of Granny. Her funeral was quiet; no one came, except for our neighbors. That's when I realized my brother needed to be taken care of. I returned home at eight that day, the second day, as well as the following day. I was twenty when I found the future I could vision.

I tried to start all over again. But I couldn't stop the drugs. I couldn't fight it. It got worse, I needed more. I couldn't work, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I couldn't look in my brother's eye when I talk to him. Couldn't let him find out about me. Couldn't. Couldn't let it happen.

It was then I took the same car and ran away.

I hate comedies.

I hate tragedies.

My life wasn't a sorrowful story, it started with a tragedy and ended in a comedy.

I do not own Gundam Wing or anything of it. I only own the plot (if it exists).

A/N: the corrected (grammar and spell checked) version.