Loosing a friend and brother

The darkness fills my body and soul when I think back on that grueling day. The guilt and sadness of the entire event flashes by and my stomach turns like waves in a hurricane. I rerun every movement and saying but when he walks out of the house I try to go outside and stop him, the door is slammed shut and barricaded from the other side. I run to every possible exit but my luck has run out like a bottle of whiskey in the house of an alcoholic.

I talk to everyone in the house, trying to get someone to listen, trying to get someone to stop him but they walk past me and ignoring me like I simply don’t exist. Then I see myself talking to my friend as if nothing is wrong.  I scream at myself but nothing sinks in. Don’t they see me at all, surely I should hear myself?

There I stand cleaning her bedroom and finally taking a seat on the sofa. She puts in the DVD and we light up a cigarette and drink our coffee. Gran walks past our room and she goes into the back garden to continue her daily gardening. I get up to go to the bathroom and see Aunty Gail getting back to bed. The music from the room in the backyard trumpets through the entire house, it sounds like an Eminem CD jacked into a local taxi with more base than needed!

How can everyone be so calm? How can they just go on with their day, while the tragedy of a lifetime is about to occur within a few moments? I see myself walking back to her room and sit back down on the sofa. I swing my legs over the arm of the sofa to get a comfortable angle.  I see myself talking to her, asking her if we should not ask him to join us for a movie, telling her that after everything that was said, perhaps we should go out that night to get it off his mind.

We continue to watch the movie and more or less thirty minutes fly past and I see Gail walking to past our room and I hear the back door opening with ease this time round. I hear her screaming and we run outside to the back, my feet barely touch the steps and I run around the wall to find him hanging there. I see him hanging there with his lifeless body connected to the roof with white lead wire. Gail continues to scream and cry at once and pretty much so does everyone else, its chaos around me and I need to make some sort of order to it all.

I lift his feet and scream to Gail so that she can remove the wire from his neck. I place him softly on the ground scared that his porselein body would break into pièces. I instruct her to give him CPR and I run back to the room to get my cell phone, I call the cops and urge them to come quick. We hear the ambulance far in the distance but instead of the sounds becoming closer it fades. I start to panic and take over CPR from Gail trying to give her a break. I tell her to calm Gran and just take her into the house before I loose my mind. Marlene sits on the steps of the kitchen just moving back and forth not saying a word. To me she looks like a patient in a mental hospital.

Perhaps that is where I have found myself upon, inside the world of a crazy person and all of this is just a dream. The only problem of my theory is that everything feels so real. The idea of it all is unreal but I can feel his cold lips each time I try to breath the life back into him. I can still hear Gran’s crying in the distance coming from the house and I can see the Marlene just sitting there with the Eminem CD still pumping its beat in the background.

Gail gets back and offers to take over from me and I gladly step down. I go to the room and switched off the overbearing rap sounds which are driving me crazy by now.  I walk to Marlene and tap her on the shoulder and walk to the front gate. We sit on the porch not saying a word to each other. The sun is on its highest but all I can see is the darkness overbearing on this house. The ambulance sounds are becoming clearer and within a few minutes they stop in front of the house. I open the gate and urge them to hurry when the paramedic tells me that they struggled to find the house and it’s their first day on the job. I lead them to the back garden and take them Jesse and his mother. They shock him twice before he shows a pulse and they load him onto the stretcher where they now want to move him to the ambulance. I walk behind them still not knowing what it is I am and should be feeling. The lady lets go of the stretcher and runs past me and with reflexes kicking in, I grab the stretcher and walk with to ambulance where they load him onto the trolley bed and into the ambulance. The paramedic comes back and you can smell the stent of fresh vomit from her breath.

I can feel my mouth starting to water but I keep it in and once the ambulance drives off I run to the bathroom and puke.  I come back and take a seat on the porch, next to Marlene. She hands me a cigarette and take a deep drag on in, I slowly blow out the smoke and we sit there for hours not saying a word to each other.

Your mind runs crazy with silly thoughts and you still hope that it’s just a bad dream and in a few hours you wil wake up to find everything in place. The truth to the matter is nothing was ever in place again after that day ever again.