I'm dreaming. I know I am, but I can't wake myself up; I just have to endure the painful moments all over again. I hate it, I know what's coming, yet I'm utterly useless to stop it.

"Hey short stack," Tyler says to me as I walk into the living room.

I flinch as he playfully throws a punch at me. He calls me short stack as a term of endearment. Even though he's older, I'm roughly an inch taller than him.

I flop down on the couch, grab the remote, and flip on Netflix. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch him putting on his motorcycle gloves. I look at him and he's wearing his leather, too.

"Where you off to?"

He grins at me. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

"C'mon."

"Aw—you wanna live your life vicariously through me?"

I laugh. "Fuck off. As if."

"Hey," he tells me seriously, pointing a gloved hand at me. "If pa heard you say that..."

I laugh again. "He swears more than the both of us combined!"

After a short pause, Tyler laughs with a shrug. "Okay, ya got me, but you know he'd tan your hide if he heard you."

"Well," I droll, a easy smile on my face. "Lucky me, then, that he's at the shop."

Tyler heads to the door and then stops
"Oh, I almost forgot. Mom ran out to get groceries. So it'll just be you for awhile."

"Okay," I reply, only half listening as I settle on a dumb show to watch and turn my brain off to for awhile.

"So be on your best behavior."

"Whatever."

"Don't trash the house."

Still not looking at him, I smile. "I ain't you."

"No boys."

Now my head snaps to look at him, and he's grinning like the devil at me. I laugh. "Fuck off...Not like you've never snuck a girl in here before."

"Behave yourself, Tristan Kai Smith."

I look back at the TV. "Yes, mother dearest."

Tyler opens the door but then pauses. If I believed in such things, I'd say he knew he wasn't coming back. He didn't show me actual affection regularly, but...that day, right before he left?

"Hey."

I looked at Tyler.

"I love you."

I'm going to take the regret of not saying it back to him to my grave. Instead, I flipped him the bird. "Get lost already, yeesh."

Tyler smiled at me, and it was the last time I was going to see that smile in person. Because roughly twenty minutes later, I got a phone call from ma. And she's sobbing, and I can't understand what she's saying. She's telling me dad is going to pick her up from the grocery store because she's too distraught to drive, and then they'll be right home. And it takes ma a few times of telling me that Tyler got hit by a truck and was dead for it to sink in.

When ma hung up I didn't put the receiver back on the cradle. I don't know why we still had a land line; it was so archaic. For real, who did that anymore? More importantly, who offered that service still? And as I stood there, looking at the phone that had started to beep at me incessantly because I hadn't hung it up yet, it dawned on my that Tyler was never going to touch the phone again.

He wasn't going to hold the ugly, forest green, old piece of technology in his palm ever again. I would never hear his voice come through that phone like I had so many times over the years. In fact, it dawned on me, slowly, that I was never going to hear his voice again. Period.

It was with that slow, methodical thought that the weight of my brother being dead finally began to take hold. He wasn't coming home today. He wasn't going to be there in the morning with us, half-asleep, crunching on his cereal. We were never going to fight over who got to use the bathroom to brush our teeth first. I wouldn't have anyone I could tell all my secrets to. I was untethered from the young man who allowed me to love myself, who gave me a safe, supportive space for me to be gay in when I was so, so very afraid.

No Tyler to read to me in bed in our pajamas when we were little. No Tyler to comfort me after I fell out of the tree in the back yard until our parents ran out. No Tyler to console me when my first crush turned me down because he was straight.

I would never hear his dreams and aspirations again. Never again would he and I sneak up on the roof late at night, sometimes doing nothing more than staring up at the stars and enjoying each other's company. Once there was a time when he was he got into a fist fight at school. Ma and dad were furious, and it was one of the only times I ever heard either of them shout. When they were done, Tyler had slinked off into my room, and I told him dirty jokes until he laughed.

I covered for him when he almost got caught with a girl in his room, stalled for time until she could sneak out the window. When we were playing baseball in the house, and Tyler smashed ma's favorite lamp, I jumped in and said I did it. When he, for reasons that still elude me to this day, got a tattoo without permission and it got infected and he ended up in the ER, I told ma and dad he did it because I dared him to to get some of the blame off him.

Then it hit me. Tyler had told me he loved me. The last words he said to his little brother before he died were, "I love you." And of course I didn't know it was going to play out like that, but I could hear him say that, clear as day in my head. It didn't seem like he had said those words about a half hour ago, but rather right then.

And that's what broke me. So I went into his room and curled up on his bed and just cried. I bawled for hours. Ma and dad came home, and we were all pretty inconsolable. Yet as I was in the fetal position, I made a vow to myself.

I understood then that you never know how much time you have with someone. It could be years, it could be minutes, it could be seconds. Furthermore, my own mortality was hanging precariously over my head. I promised from that day forward I would lead with kindness. The day my brother died, I understood how fickle life can be, how short it can be.

Being angry wasn't worth it. Getting upset wasn't worth it. Negative emotions and thoughts weren't productive. From that point forward—as I cried into the covers of Tyler's bed until there was a large wet spot from my snot and tears—I took a silent oath that I would try to live as kindly and compassionately as I could.

I open my eyes, and I'm still on a wet comforter. A few moments pass and I realize it's not my brother's bed, that it was my pillow that had become tear-stained. I look over my shoulder, happy to find David still in my bed. So I flip over, pull him close to me, and try not to think of anything at all until I'm asleep again.