Page 135 of Beautiful Obsessions
I knew my brother.
Knew the cadence of his voice.The way he wasted nothing, not words or movement.Not love.I knew the shape of his silences and what lived inside them.And I knew that if death had not taken him first, he would have found some way to leave me something.
Not poetry or sentiment, but a bruising kind of truth.
So sometimes, when the night was hard, and the grief was fierce, I imagined the letter he never got to write to me.
I imagined him somewhere cold and bleeding, with death at his shoulder and my name in his mouth, forcing whatever strength he had left into one final act of protection.
And in my head, it sounded like this:
Archie,
If you are hearing these words in whatever broken place the dead leave them, then it means I did not make it back to you.
It means he moved first, and I ran out of time.So listen to me carefully.
I did not leave you.
Whatever story you were given, whatever poison he poured in your ear, whatever version of my death he handed you and called truth—I need you to know this before anything else:
I did not leave you.
I know what you will think at first, because I know you better than I know myself.You will be angry before you are heartbroken.You will let rage carry what grief is too heavy to lift.You will think I chose some coward’s way out and abandoned you in that house with him.
I didn’t.
If I could have reached you, I would have.
If I’d had one more hour, I would have spent it finding a way to get word to you.
If I’d had one more day, I would have used it to drag you out of that place by the throat if I had to.
So hear me now.
Whatever happened to me, it was not surrender.And it was never you I wanted left behind to carry it.
You were the one good thing to come out of that house.The only thing in it that ever felt clean.
I knew that from the first moment Anna placed you in my arms and you stopped crying like somehow you already understood I was yours and you were mine.I did not know what to do with something so small then.I only knew I would kill for you if I had to.
That never changed.Not when you got older.Not as you grew loud and reckless and furious at the world.
Not when you stood in front of me and insisted the crown should be mine, as though fairness had ever had any place in our father’s world.
You loved too openly.That was always what made me afraid for you.
Men like him look at love and see weakness.
He would have looked at what I felt for you and called it weakness.He would have been wrong.
It was the only thing that ever made me strong enough to endure him.
So, if you remember anything of me, remember this: I stayed as long as I did because you were still there.Because Anna was still there.Because leaving would have meant trusting him not to consume what remained, and I never trusted him with anything worth keeping.
Do not hate me for going where you could not follow.
Do not turn me into another reason to destroy yourself.
