At the End of Violence

I feel as though I am yelling to the world and my voice is echoing off every wall, every tree and passing object, bouncing back in my face and deafening only myself. I'm telling them all I want peace! Begging for it over the loud roar of emotional gunfire. I'm in the middle of the war with a flower in my hand and no shoes. I'm fucked.

When my brothers big hands grabbed the fabric of my clothes and I felt myself tumble towards the desk in my dining room, a thousand thoughts raced through my mind. When I felt my body propel backwards and found myself face to face with the floor, the only thing keeping me from hitting it - Max's bicep around my neck, I felt a real fear.

As if it were poison, my own brother's rage seaped through his skin and stained my neck. He screamed at me and it was loud but all I remember now is a lull of confusion and the bewilderment in his eyes. Who was that person? What had finally become of him?

His veins were screaming beneath the surface and his nose flarred like a dog. He told me never to touch him again. He came at me as though I had put cigarettes out on his arms for years. Whose glasses was he wearing? What was he looking at when he told me never to hit him again? I'm so little next to him. I'm harmless.

Even his arms were red with anger.

I didn't understand any of it in that moment and I don't understand it a day later either. I became hysterical once he left. I had never seen that look on his face or that anger towards me and it scared me more than I ever thought my brother could or ever would.

My mother seemed furious at first, remembering her husbands face inside her own son, getting sick at the thought but was she scared of him to? I'm not sure of anything. When we talked the inncident out when we got home she seemed angry at me still. Because I am with her most, we fight a lot. I say and do a lot of things that remind her of her mother and it makes her resent me. Did she somehow feel I got what I deserved?

She made him come home from work at 9pm and talk about it. He entered with a annoyed look on his face, he laughed at me for being upset and at the end of a 40 minute circle argument, I stood at the doorway and my mother was mad... at me.

"Where are you going?" she wanted to know. "You're making this worse by stressing me out because you're leaving!"

I just looked at her angry face then I looked at him, smiling. Disgusting, the both of them. Their lives wildly out of control and me, just trying to pass through the cracks of their anger and getting wedged between them. I walked out.

I mourned my loss last night. I mourned the little scraps of faith I thought I had left for my mother and the traces of friendship I thought my brother had for me. He never had respect because he doesn't understand what respect is. And what was I expecting from them?

How long will I be punished for a past I'm trying to patch? How long will it be thrown in my face to remind me just how poorly I did things? Will I ever learn to be deaf to them?

Was it beyond reaching to hope they could just accept me? Even just my mother?

Heather said it was a test. But how can you go into battle, when you've only learned what kind of gun you're holding?

I wasn't ready.