You promised.
You said you'd keep him safe.
I trusted you.
He was hurting. He was mourning. He was in danger from himself.
And he was my brother.
You were too, at one point, but I'm no longer sure I can call you that. I don't know if I'll ever be able to call you that.
You only have four fears. But that doesn't mean the rest of us don't have more.
And this was one of mine. Maybe I had pictured more blood, but this was worse. Because this way, he looks alive. He looks like he could come back. Like I could see his smile, hear his laugh, listen to his jokes. But I can't. And he won't come back.
I had always feared this.
Ever since the first time I went into my fear landscape, this was the worst. This was always the last, and the strongest, and the longest fear. He was my little brother.
I've known him since the moment he was born. I had only lived two years before I knew him, two years when I was so young I barely remember them anyway. And now, because of you, I'll have to live the rest of my life without him. Without his smile, without his laugh, without his constant teasing.
And now you put the responsibility on us, on mom and I. You tell us we have to decide whether to unplug him. And this, this is worse than all my fear landscape combined, and I was not lucky enough to only have four fears. This, this is beyond torture. Because I can't wake up.
He would have wanted me to unplug him. Wants me to unplug him. Because while I know he is gone, I cannot bring myself to admit it. To face the fact that I will have to live without him now, and that eventually, I will have lived longer without him than with him, and he will become a memory, nearly forgotten with time. But I will not let that happen. He will never become just a memory, because he was- is- so much more than that. He is my brother, and I do not know if I will ever be able to let him go.
He would have wanted me to say goodbye. He would make some joke, some comment about how Shauna will be there to comfort me, and how comfort often leads to more. He would laugh it off. He would tell me to let go, to move on. To let him move on. To let him go see Marlene, and Lynn, and dad. But I don't know if I can.
He was my brother.
And you were too. You were my brother, just like him. But brothers don't kill brothers. Brothers don't make promises that important and then break them. So I don't know if you can be my brother anymore, because you killed my other one. My only other one.
And I can't let him go.