I walked through the house, clutching that note like it could save my life, like it could save Phillip’s. After I’d exhausted myself, I fell asleep with the note balled up in my fist.
I woke up a few hours later to the sound of music.
It was floating up from the downstairs. Queen, my brother’s favorite. He’d put it on every night when he studied. It drove my mom crazy. I’d learned to live with it. I let the music guide me to the living room where my brother’s iPod was plugged into the stereo. I had walked through this house hundreds of times, memorizing every single inch of my brother’s life and I knew for a fact that this iPod had never been plugged into this machine. It should have been sitting at his bedside table.
I fell to the ground and held my hands against my head as strains of Somebody to Love pounded into my ears. This couldn’t be real, could it? And what if it was? I hadn’t asked for this. Of course I wanted my brother back, but I wanted the real him back, not all these little reminders of the man he had been.
I got fired from my job the next week. I’d stopped showing up, opting to sit at home and wait for the next message to appear. Oftentimes there’d be notes on scraps of paper strewn throughout the house. Nothing very important, usually an address here or there, a little “have a nice day, love you!” to someone who had once been special. Sometimes there was more.
It all came to a head one night when I left my computer open for Phillip. It was out of curiosity, really. I wanted to see if he would show up, if he would write something for me. Something especially for me. If we were going to communicate, I wanted it to be direct. Some small part of my mind was still rational, but for the most part I’d abandoned myself to the fantasy of my brother coming out of his coffin.