Chapter Text
My therapist put me up to this.
Well--my old therapist. I’ve since stopped seeing him, and for a long time, the idea of closure through writing down my story--my brother’s story, I mean--has lingered in the back of my head.
I thought it was a stupid idea, to be honest. I couldn’t see how in the world dwelling on the past, on someone I miss so damn much, could possibly help me deal with the pain. It seemed easier to just stop thinking about it for a while; form new relationships, meet new people, live new stories. Stories with happier endings.
But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a certain man--his name is Frank Iero.
The truth is, I haven’t seen him in almost four years. I wish I knew where he lives now, but when he moved, he didn’t even give me a call let alone leave me with a new address.
The last time I saw Frank, we were in his old apartment, which had grown messy and dirty over the past month. Frank was usually such a clean person.
I had asked him something. Something about my brother, I can’t really remember what, and he’d just shrugged, eyes going blank, and then he was walking away from me, into his bedroom. When he returned, there was a box in his arms. He set it on the ground beside me feet, didn’t say anything.
There was a pillow in the box, underneath a sketch pad, some pencils, a couple of wadded-up t-shirts, and some folded papers. I picked at one of the papers, unfolding it to find my brother’s messy handwriting. It was like a punch in the gut, but I just frowned at it and folded it back up, letting it drop back into the box.
“You don’t want to keep these notes?” I asked him.
He shook his head, “No point.”
My heart sank. “No point? I mean… the t-shirts, though. Those were practically yours, anyway.”
“They smell like.” His sentence ended abruptly. The last word should have been him. It was as if the word alone would cause him to break out in a nasty rash.
I stared down at the box of my brother’s belongings. I felt as sad as Frank looked. “I can’t take this stuff, man.”
He stared at me, silent for a long time before he nodded and said, “You have to. I don’t want them.”
“Don’t you think he’d want you to, like…” I shrugged, “Remember him?”
But after that, he never said another word to me. He just stood there, still, silent, a frown on his face. I couldn’t really tell what he was staring at, but I thought it was the small pile of folded notes.
After a few futile attempts to pull some more words out of him, I gave up and picked up the box, inching toward the door, eyes still on Frank.
The last thing I said to him was, “See you on Saturday.” The funeral was on Saturday.
He didn’t attend the funeral.
It’s the way he acted that I’ve been thinking about so much lately. When my brother died, Frank’s mind seemed to shut off. He was distant, cut off from everybody else, silent. His signature grin, that stretch of pink lips and the somehow mischievous gleam of his lip ring, like a sly wink, had vanished.
He wasn’t in the room when my brother died--he wasn’t even at the hospital. And I think that made it a lot easier for him to pretend that it never actually happened. That he’d never even met my brother.
Frank couldn’t say his name anymore. Most of the time, he couldn’t even manage to utter the word him in reference to my brother.
To see Frank withdraw like that hurt. I’d only known him for six months, but he’d managed to become my closest friend--bar my brother. And it was so painfully obvious that he was dying on the inside. He kept himself quite composed; I saw him shed tears only twice after my brother died. His stubborn attitude about the whole thing, though, the way he refused to talk about it, seemed to refuse to even think about it… it only served to make things harder for him.
How the hell was he supposed to get over my brother’s death if he refused to accept that fact that it actually happened?
That’s why I’m writing this. I don’t want to be like Frank. I don’t want to keep ignoring the subject. I need closure. Maybe it’ll hurt less.
Maybe not.
But maybe the pain will be easier to handle.
I wish I could find Frank. I wish I could help him find closure.