"Let's race right off the cliff, they will remember this."

Brendan's dead.

I'm so close to the edge, of what I don't know. Am I even really awake? Someone wake me up, pinch me, do something, something, anything, to awaken me from this slumber. I'm spiraling down this plastic playground slide that will catapult me into a pit of razors and cigarette butts instead of mulch. I'm the little 5-year-old that lived with her father and stepmother in Ohio. I'm the elderly 70-year-old who has lost everything, seen everything, done everything, it's out of my control, it's out of my control. I'm so unaware of the irony in everyday life that sometimes it has to smack me in the face before I realize it's there. Read my last post, the one about the girl who wakes up in the hospital. Ironic, it's all very ironic. I got out yesterday. Brendan didn't.

Brendan's dead.

I listen to the sounds of my music, pouring like an endless inferno of flame through the speakers, and I don't even hear what the lyrics are telling me. The only person I can bring myself to be around is my neighbor. And he doesn't even know how shredded I am on the inside. I see my family, I see my computer screen, I see the torn bits of paper scattered across my floor, I see my room, same four walls, same four walls, I just remember the first time we met. It's so dark, it's 9:30, he's dead, he's dead.

Brendan's dead.

I didn't know him all that well. I met him maybe three or four times. But we had spoken. I always wondered how he was still surviving through all that had happened. Cancer took my maternal grandpa, it took my paternal grandma, it took my friends' parents, and now it took my friend. He's gone. D's so miserable. I'm a 2-hour drive away and I can't do anything to comfort him. I shouldn't even be complaining, I'm trying really hard not to get upset about this, I barely knew him for god's sake.

Brendan's dead.

D's more upset than I expected, and I expected him to be upset. For heaven's sake, he was going to visit Brendan the day he died. He was driving to Brendan's house with K when he got the call. I'm lucky, and he is too, that he didn't drive off the road. He probably did. He's okay though. Brendan isn't.

Rest in peace. You were a soldier; I can only aspire to be as strong as you were.

I was in the hospital during the funeral.

Brendan's dead.

I don't want to write anymore.