Now that I am dead, I want to tell you a few things. Truth be told, I want to tell you everything that you will ever need to know, and warn you against everything that could ever hurt you, and give you everything in life that you could ever need to be happy. But, I neither can nor would do that. You need to be sad, sometimes, so that you can feel the happiness; and you need to hurt, sometimes, to feel the pleasure of comfort and contentment.

And you need to learn so many things by yourself.

The biggest thing that I want to tell you is, I suppose, entirely useless in the long run. It is not something that you can use to win an argument or win a heart. It is not something with which you can shield yourself when the world rains down too heavily upon you. It is nothing, in the grand scheme of things.

Little brother, I miss you.

You drop everything for anyone, every time. Blackride on trains for hours if it will get you to someone who needs you, and talk for a short eternity if a soundtrack is needed. Talking and talking and talking, that one-sided conversation with no complaint, just to keep someone alive.

And you stand in the falling snow and high winds until long after all lights around have been extinguished, in absolute silence, in the presence of all those absent voices, listening and listening and listening, just in case a familiar word breaks through the wall of quiet.

More often than not, it has all been for me.

You have called, sometimes crying, and we have met under the poison oak, and exchanged saline for song. You have been blue as jazz, and we have spent a day in the dreamlands that you built, with your little cabin on the moors, my saxophone hanging on the wall, your easel in the corner; all of the ridiculous fantasies that we entertained when the real world hurt too much. We were tied together by nothing but that which we tied with our own two pairs of hands. There was no blood between us, no chemical bond. That did not matter. I wondered, for a long while, if we would have stayed together, had that been the case.

Apologies are a sign of weakness, I said; but sometimes, they are called for, nonetheless.

Yes- I am sorry, little brother, that I showed you what I did. I am sorry that I took you to the highest spot and didn’t tell you that you were wrong when you guessed that it was from there that I tempted fate and leaned too far over the edge. I am sorry that we fell apart.

You were the reason that I carried on carrying on, because you believed in me. Well, kid, I believe in you. I told you that nothing stays the same forever, and I was right, because now I am dead, and the only thing that remains the same is that I never did, and never will, say that which should have been said.

Most of all, little brother, I am sorry that I let you down, and when we drifted, I did not write the words that I should have written, and tell you.

Little brother, I miss you.