“We can get ice cream and you can tell me a nice story about him.”We didn&rs

“We can get ice cream and you can tell me a nice story about him.”


We didn’t get ice cream, and later I laid in bed silently thinking for a long time, coming up only with stories decidedly not nice.

“One time we did coke and we cooked a chicken-” no, no.
“He once threw up in his own hair and-” ah…

A life highlighted and loudly punctuated by not nice.
But I turned things over and over, and slowly the quiet moments in between unfolded. 


He was a welder.  He loved cars.
And skateboarding, and snowboarding, and fishing.

He was an artist, every medium he touched came to him effortlessly.  Drawing, sculpture, music.
He taught himself to play guitar.


He would have been 33 last week. 
And I had considered him dying many, many times.  Not in that hateful way you sometimes hastily hope for a sibling to die because they do something shitty in a way siblings often do.  I’d always thought of a car crash, of drugs.  Of the myriad dangerous situations he always managed to get into. 

I failed tremendously to imagine how much I would miss him.