The deaths of our parents drove my brother into isolation from the world, and most importantly his siblings. It was strange, he was the middle child out of five children, yet their deaths was the deaths that impacted him the most.
My brother, out of everyone in his family, was the smartest and most promising one. He had the highest IQ, went to an Ivy League school on a full ride scholarship, majored in business and entrepreneurship, and worked at a high paying job in a highly admired company. None of these mean anything to him anymore, because he left all of that behind. He used the money he had in savings and bought two houses; one in the heart of the city and one in the heart of nowhere surrounded by nature.
Before our parent’s deaths, our father was diagnosed with severe atherosclerosis. Since he was near his seventies, we all braced ourselves with his death, including my brother. Our mother was healthy until they called the house to tell us about our father passing away. Mother broke down resulting in a heart attacked and followed father into heaven. The day after the funeral, we found out about my brother’s isolation plan.
I was never close to my brothers, but I couldn’t leave him all alone in the woods dying of depression, or whatever it was that drove him into isolation. A person as smart and promising as my brother could not possibly be a friend of depression. So as his younger sister, I took the privilege of visiting him every now and then.
Each day that I visited him, his body changed more and more. He started getting paler and skinnier and his movements slowed down. The three hours I spent at his house every week or so, was spent sitting down and chatting or watching an old film. Then he would fall asleep and I would leave.
My visits to his house lasted for almost a year. The last time I visited him, he was sleeping on his $4,000 leather sofa that was too expense for him to have bought, considering he was unemployed, and he never woke up again.
The death of my brother was unclear, but it was clear how much the deaths of our parents impacted to him, it drove him right into the arms of death himself. We, as his family, buried him right next to our parents.
No one wanted to go to brother’s house to claim or throw away his things, and the government was more than happy to have his properties since his didn’t have a will written out. So I decided to round up his things with plans to later on discuss about the future of his properties with the rest of my family.
I didn’t know what exactly made me looked through his laptop first, maybe it was the fact that he owned one that lead me to it. Through all the times spent with him, I never saw this laptop before. Beside, he was always more of a nature and old fashion guy. As soon as I opened up the laptop, I realized that it wasn’t shut off and didn’t have a password protecting it. I got in and started snooping around, apologizing to my ghostly brother if I do happen to cross one of his secrets. But I never thought that I would cross not one but several secrets.
In my brother’s laptop, he wrote a journal in the format of Word document in a file clearly labeled “Journal.” Inside, there was about 200 Word documents, and as I checked, every one was written day by day around ten to eleven o’clock, the time when no one was bothering him. Inside the first journal labeled simply with a number, “1,” I learnt the most darkest secret my family had. In that first paragraph, he wrote about missing our parents and the love they used to give him. This surprised me, I used to think our parents didn’t give my brother enough attention, that they thought he was good on his own and didn’t need their love anymore, but I guess was wrong. They loved him, but their love stepped over some boundaries. In details, my brother wrote about the times they shared a bed together.
In shock, I closed the laptop and just stared at it. Then I ran out of his house and into the safety of the world that doesn’t know the secrets my brother had. Thoughts ran through my mind that day, all the why’s and how’s. Why did they slept with him? Why did he obliged? How did could they do this to the family? How could my brother still loved them? It was definitely the curiosities that made me bought a brand new USB and transferred all the Word documents in it; and deleted the files on his laptop.
To keep my mind off the documents, I worked hard and cleared the house in the woods. The house in the heart of the city was never used, or at least it didn’t look like it was used. After clearing the house, I sat in the middle of his living room and opened the documents. Documents after documents, I read about my brother’s private life that none of us knew about.
After our parents stopped showing him affections and inviting him into their bedroom, he was alone. He talked of his depression, his “best friend” as he called it, in his late teens. Then he talked about being sexually active during that period and how it affected him to continued on being sexually active. He was listing “the names of all the people who wanted my night as much as I wanted theirs.” In that two page long list, there was a couple names I recognized: a cousin of ours, his boss, a professor who highly admired him, a friend of father’s, our eldest brother’s best friend, my sister’s husband, and my ex-boyfriend.
On journal 45, he wrote about the melodies of loneliness and how drugs bring the love out of it. Most of the journals have errors, like he was just typing to clear his head, but this one was beyond readable. There were errors in every sentence. It was obvious that he was on drugs during this journal entry. On journal 51, there was someone else typing the journal with him. They talked about the sex they shared with multiple other people. Journal 67 was short. He just wrote, “Another day gone by without the love of my creation. Another breathe wasted without the need to keep living.” Yet, he contradicted himself with the next entry proclaiming his love for everyone and “the stench of sex, my token to heaven, my reason to keep living.”
My brother, I learnt, was no stranger to men nor women nor even natural. He was no stranger to drugs, nightlife, or prostitution. Oh, my brother experienced all things in life, both in the world that gave his family a smile and the world that willed him to be the beast he learnt and desired to be.
I stopped reading on journal 110, where he talked of the parties thrown at the house in the heart of cities. The journals he wrote were so bizarre to me that I began to suspect that they were fake, something he wrote because of boredom. There was no evidence to back up any of his entries, and a part of me was glad for that. My brother, the smart and intelligence one out of his whole family, cannot be this monster I read about.
A week after my brother’s funeral and just a day after I stopped reading the journals, I received a call from the hospital. They had news for the family, and the evidence to my doubts of my brother’s secrets. They informed us that our late brother was a victim of AIDS and would like permission to release his name to the AIDS foundation so they can keep track of those passed away with AIDS.
“No, you do not have permission,” was all I said to them as I hung up. In my defense, they don’t even know if the AIDS was what killed him, and I don’t really want a testing to prove more that my brother’s journal was real.
With the USB in my hand, I drove to our parents’ and my brother’s grave. I shadowed my brother’s headstone and stared at it. His name engraved in the cream white stone and the quote of him as a loving brother to all. On the ground, there was plenty of flowers, the news of his death spreading to all his friends, whether they are the ones he slept with or those that he made acquaintance with without sexual attraction, the flowers accumulated. And right next to a flower, there was a hole on the ground, like my dead brother was begging for the USB tightly clutched in my hand.
I started laughing hysterically. My parents took the secret of their love for my brother into their graves. Next to them, my brother lay dead, who also took all of his secrets into his grave, both figuratively and, as I pushed the USB deep into the ground, literally.
I wiped the dirt onto my jeans and then looked at the small amount of dirt still lined in the creases of my hand. A tear dropped onto my hand, running the dirt out of my creases, as I realized that I am now the one who will also take the secrets my parents and my brother had, just like they did, into my own grave.