The sun’s warm rays send goose bumps through my body as I’m sitting on the once white bench, tapping my foot to the beat of my iPod. The song takes me back to my childhood. Back to when I was young and naïve. Back to when my life was simple. And back in time to before I lost someone special and my life crashed straight into a brick wall; straight into hell.




It takes me back to the days when I would come home from school thoroughly frustrated, and stomp through the door to find Rocky, my older brother, sitting in the garage completely lost in a song with his guitar. His steady rhythmically tapping, converse covered foot would instantaneously steal my easily lost attention. At his side, was his long board. It’s beautiful and personally customized artwork, but well worn from everyday use. It never failed to capture me and draw me into my own parallel universe, one where no distraction could possibly pull the unconscious smile from my dazed face.




He had a sixth sense I swear. Or perhaps he just knew me better than I know myself, but whenever any part of my life veered off the tracks, whether I told him or not, he noticed. I remember having this huge problem with a friend of mine in 4th grade. We wouldn’t hangout with each other, laugh and smile, play our special games, and share our jokes that nobody else understood, let alone look at each other; elementary school drama. This was nothing to him; he solved it as easy as screwing on the cap to a plastic bottle.




Memories are the worst, unexpectedly welcoming themselves to my overcrowded thoughts without invitation. Sitting in class halfway through an algebra test, the images suddenly take control of my vision and I lose the little concentration that I had. I see his long board stuck in the ditch across the highway from where body lies, curled, unconscious under the blue midnight sky. A car pulled off to the side, the one who was aware enough to notice his helpless body in the road, the one who was crying for help. Then I see the car that didn’t notice, the car that killed him. Rocky is lying there, cold and alone. Sometimes it’s obvious what triggered the flashbacks and other times I have no idea, but either way it unfortunately allows my abandoned emotions to arise and painfully cut open partially healed scars.




It seems as though he was the simplifier. He would take my problems that I had thought to be huge, just something I would have to let run its course, but instead he would always have a way to show me how to solve it. It was as though it was his second nature. He knew the answer before I had finished the question. He was the type of person where you would have no idea that he was smart, until he blew you away in a spelling bee.




Even though he possessed and still possesses a huge part of my heart, I can’t help but wonder what things would be like if he hadn’t entered my life. Although I cling to every moment I spent with him in my presence, I still fight the conflicting feeling of wishing I had never met him. Part of my heart was buried in the ground with his body. And even though he caused me tremendous pain, I love him and I’d do anything to earn another day with him, my big brother.