I Still Look for You on Sleepless Nights

CW: minor abuse, suicide

My little brother and I—we should’ve been born as twins, the way we could read each other’s minds. The friendly ladies at church said it was God’s doing, but my brother stated they were just trying to brainwash us like the aliens we’ve seen in cartoons do. Later, we hurtled down our neighborhood street like firecrackers, stomachs aching from giggling so hard.

That was the other thing we shared unabashedly: our imaginations.

We posed as ninjas, as celebrities, as superheroes. In summer afternoons, he and I lounged in our backyard while our parents napped, sticky popsicle residue on our mouths and hands. There on the grass, we pretended we were undercover agents hired to spy on our evil mastermind neighbors—like all kids do, obviously.

Even on rainy days, we belted daydreams into stories into full reenactments. I had this teddy bear that we fused with a tangled, blonde wig to be the princess since neither of us wanted to. Sometimes, I was an evil witch or wizard, and my brother was a prince—or princess when I lost the bear. Other times, it was the other way around; we never stuck with stereotypes because we were cool like that.

He built blanket forts regularly. We sat curled up in them for hours at night and day until we grew too big to fit in the small space between our beds. So we moved on to the grandiose living room—until Mom blew up after finding the stashes of candy wrappers and chip crumbs under the couch.

She suggested the basement. We were too scared of the dark.

Eventually, Dad agreed to buy and set up a small, transparent tent on the back porch. I shoved all the mats I could find onto the floor of the square space, and my brother brought his mountain of pillows and stuffed animals. We weren’t allowed snacks after the last fiasco, but I don’t think either of us minded. Under the dusky blues, I cradled a small, dim lamp, and my brother unzipped the outside cover to gaze up at the night sky through plastic film.

It was heaven to us—that mini haven. A pocket-sized garden of Eden.

“Look!” My brother pointed. “That’s Orion’s belt! And there—” he waved his little fingers frantically at the blues and deep purples and glittering stars— “that’s Pegasus!”

“Aren’t they just stars? I can’t see any pictures.” I tucked my blankets around me in a large cocoon. “But we can be astronauts if you want to.”

“What about aliens? They’re cool. And smarter than people. We can be super smart!”

I scrunched up my face. “No, aliens are gross!”

“Mmm, I kind of wish I was a star.” My brother’s voice was hushed in awe as the night drowned in his eyes, all those celestial bodies like gently lit galaxy clusters. “I want to sleep in the night sky. On the moon.”

“Because it’s made of cheese? But you don’t even like cheese.”

“No!” he whined. “I just want to—don’t they all look so pretty?”

We fell asleep pretending we were planets and suns and stars alike.

✧✧✧

Middle school was a black hole. As it pulled with its invisible strings, I couldn’t help but notice the growing eyebags under my brother’s eyes—darker shades of Neptune’s colors. Naturally, I asked. He didn’t answer. He never answered anymore.

I later found all his space books crumpled in the bottom drawer of our shared shelf.

We were too old for the tent now. Dad shoved it into a storage room in the basement. We were too old to be scared of that now, too.

My brother’s appearance continued to wear away, more sickly and duller than before. Still, he kept to himself, and I truly felt the stretch, then, of the imagination we used to share so easily. Of the distance between us as it grew from two beds into two rooms, from blanket forts to noise-canceling headphones, or from pillow fights to real arguments.

In Sunday school, my brother and I learned to revoke the theory of the Big Bang.

“Dude, wouldn’t it be crazy if scientists just made it up?” I laughed before faltering at his deadpan expression.

“Yeah, it would,” he muttered. I heard his room’s door slam before I heard the heartbeat roaring in my ears. I left him out of spite, out of confusion.

My brother was undeniably slipping away; I could figure out that much. But what could I do?—when he had changed so much more than I did?

✧✧✧

Sometime in ninth grade, I watched my father bring his hand across my brother’s face. I remember the crack of knuckles against flesh, fury stretched taut in the air. He said my brother was wasting his life away.

I’m not sure what was more sickening—my father’s words or my silent agreement.

“Sorry,” I had said to him after dinner.

Bitter repulsion simmered in his expression; a hatred burnt at its edges and carved in the wrinkles of his nose, the arch in his brow. “For what.”

I opened my mouth. I closed it when nothing came out.

But he seemed to have read my thoughts before I could fully form them—even when I found myself flailing to reach his. “I don’t need you to protect me anymore.” And his room door shut in front of me.

There it was again, that invisible pulling. My grades rose as his fell, and our starlit nights were tainted with my parents’ frustration at him emanating over the dinner table. Yet he strayed further into someplace no one could reach, a place I couldn’t truly see him.

It was clear by now that whatever we shared a long time ago had dissipated.

✧✧✧

One particularly hot summer, I dragged out the tent that had been building up dust in the basement. Scratches and dents littered its metal poles, and the plastic film was stained a faint yellow, so I laid it out as a mat instead of setting it up.

Stars weaved across the black sky, clearer than glass, as I knocked on my brother’s door. When he cracked it open to peer at me, I held up a tattered book filled with star charts and constellation maps.

“The sky’s really clear tonight,” I whispered. “And there’s supposed to be shooting stars.”

He followed me outside with no further conversation—a pleasant surprise, as I was so sure he wouldn’t. We were silent as we gazed up at the night on our backs, the porch’s cracked blue paint pleasantly cool against my hands. I knew it was just an excuse, another way to escape from countless essays and reading assignments and tests; still, I began to believe again.

“What happened to you?” Would he answer me now?

My brother looked away. “You still need to ask that?”

“But don’t I deserve to know why at least?” I turned my head towards him. “It’s like—you’re fading away. You have been…for a long time now.”

He didn’t say anything.

I continued. “I’ve learned how to spot Orion—see, it’s up there.” I pointed. “And that’s Pegasus. Don’t you remember?”

A summer breeze rustled through the trees in our backyard, standing around us like cupped hands. Television noise buzzed from indoors. My brother finally spoke.

“We’re not kids anymore.”

My hand fell back to my side. An imaginary crack echoed through the hollows between my ribs. Something sour bubbled in my throat. I tried to force it down under my tongue, but the placidity in me tore. It should’ve been impossible to feel cold in such a hot summer.

“You wouldn’t be like this if you just listened to our parents,” I spat out, more venomous than I thought I could be.

He laughed harshly. “Yet you’re still trying to fix me.”

“Fix you?” I sat up to face him. His eyes were unfocused. “Look at me.” Pupils like empty nebulas. “Look at me!” So, so far away. “Shit, just—” I yanked him upwards— “look at me!”

My brother ripped my hand away, face unreadable in the dark even with all the stars. “Don’t touch—”

“You think I want to fix you?” I hissed. “I have been patient, I have tried to talk to you, and I have constantly asked you what’s wrong—you think I’m not tired? Look at yourself.” My finger dug into his chest. “Why can’t you just suck it up and get over it?” Even when little shooting stars fell from his lashes, I didn’t relent. “I don’t get you. Not anymore.”

It takes a long time for black holes to stop consuming and finally die in a burst of radiation. But as long as it’s satiated, there is growth. And as long as the growth continues to feed, this rift will swallow us whole.

“I’m going inside. It’s too cold,” he lied.

I had nothing more to say to him.

His back disappeared into the summer shadows, and I watched the shooting stars alone. If I angled my head a certain way, it almost seemed like the sky was crying too.

We never again got a night as clear as that one.

✧✧✧

My brother and I filled our unspoken rift with time.

There was half a semester left before graduation. College occupied all the abysmal spaces in my mind, and my brother and I stopped talking summers ago. Our parents still dragged us to church on Sundays, but my brother was more absent than not—either he stayed in bed like a dead log, or his anger erupted, yelling annoyances and locking himself away in his impenetrable exoplanet of a room.

We were much too old to be daydreaming at this point. Well. That wasn’t it, exactly. Maybe we were still watching our nights of stars, just separately; though, I’d assume that he wanted to pluck them out of the sky more than anything.

Soon, I was buried under college applications and report cards and thoughts on the impending doom the future had to offer. Our parents noticed the tension between us, but they couldn’t do anything helpful to ease it, mere onlookers of our cowardly orbiting around each other. They stopped yelling at my brother, too. Out of indifference or apathy, I couldn’t tell.

My last summer I spent alone again, occasionally lying on the back porch, humidity a vice and the night sky a punishing reminder. Sometimes, I fell asleep to the sound of inhaling wind and exhaling leaves, ignorant of the world around me. I had the future and college to worry about, to keep me company, so the droning in my head never shut up, always overwhelming—that I didn’t hear my brother step out one night.

“You’re leaving soon,” he whispered.

I kept my eyes closed. “In two weeks.”

He sat down next to me. We exchanged no further words.

Maybe minutes passed. Maybe hours, or lightyears. Before my brother shifted away. “I’m sorry” was all he said as the sliding door scraped closed. His nebulous silhouette drifted until it broke into wisps, that broken husk of a boy. I couldn’t muster the heart to go after him.

I often thought about the sheer vastness of the sky. Infinite. Expanding. So much of it unknown. I loved the numerous possibilities as much as I hated the unpredictability. My brother and I could be looking at the same stars, but our view of the horizon always differed now.

Summer passed at the speed of light.

My brother stayed in his room. I kept to mine. We were done reading minds.

✧✧✧

I remember my mother’s voice over the phone, like space rocks colliding, colliding, shattering into dust.

Even hundreds of miles away from home, the devastating crush of loss was no less cruel in the way it flayed me apart—carving an opening where my heart should be and snapping my ribs like telescope lenses. The hours of driving made my skin hot, then icy, then scalding again; my eyes seemed to melt in their sockets as I sped down the never-ending road to home.

This wouldn’t have happened if I had been there. That’s what I thought.

But I wasn’t there, was I.

Raw, brutal sobs tore through my throat when I found my parents collapsed against each other and a grayed face with sunken eyes in front of them.

I tried not to look at him. At the bathtub filled to its brim. Water still running clear before it pooled red over the bathroom tiles. It swallowed his skin—no boundary between the edge of him and the extremities of the darkened liquid. The bathroom lights stabbed my vision, burning incessantly as if they were trying to blind me.

I pictured his fingertips under the crimson water. A maze of wrinkles. How his skin, paler than moonlight, would decompose and peel away from the flesh. From bone. Bobbing in endless space. Floating like meteoroids—God.

My parents wailed. An ugly, terrible sound. If a celestial body passed like this, would the universe mourn in the same catastrophic way?

I wailed with them.

There were no stars in the sky that night.

✧✧✧

It’s been decades now—since he passed away.

I’ve stolen multiple family photos from my parents’ house, so I won’t ever forget what he looked like during brighter, starlit times, but it’s difficult to gaze upon something I idly allowed the destruction of.

On Sundays, I occasionally find myself in a nearby church; never once have I listened to a sermon, but the routine of it is a melancholic nostalgia. I even light firecrackers in the late afternoon.

I’m trying to move on. To not blame myself.

There are days that I take a step in the right direction. And there are days that I fall right back.

I wish I had called. To make amends I should’ve made a long time ago. Talk about space again. All the stars. All the constellations. Orion, Pegasus—anything to hang on just a little longer.

I still pray for a clear night when I go camping most weekends. Maybe see if I can spot him in the stars above.