Quotes added on Monday, September 16 2013

it's okay not to be perfect 

Whenever I'm mad at a guy I try to look extra good just to make him feel bad.. I'm pretty evil

I want him back..

When I was a kid all the children used to play in the woods on the edge of town. Deep in the heart of the forest, there was an old, run down, and ragged house that everyone whispered about. There were all kinds of rumors about it being haunted, or that a monster lived in the basement. My father even said he heard about a family of cannibals that made it their home. One day while playing in the woods, my brother, who was nine at the time, was bragging about how he was the bravest kid in school. After a while, I got sick of hearing him gloat, so I told him that if he really wanted to prove himself, he should go into the basement of the old house. Of course, I didn't think he would go through with it. Nobody ever set foot in the house, but he was determined to prove his bravery. I remember feeling guilt and anxiety when he walked through the door. He stayed in there for quite a while, until the sun had set, but he finally came out at dusk. Needless to say I was relieved. When he returned, I asked him if he saw any monsters in the basement. He simply grinned, answered, "Yes," then blinked his eyes. At that moment I felt my blood run cold. It wasn't the grin. While I found his smile disturbing, it's not what had caught my attention. Nor was it his answer, as my brother was a known prankster at the time. The thing that worried me, that chilled me to my very core, was the fact that when he blinked his eyes, they shut the wrong way.

When I think about you, I can't help but smile... But do you even think about me at all ??

My brother is a year and a half older than me and has Asperger's. For those of you who may not know, it is a social form of autism. This generally means that he has a tendency to say ridiculously inappropriate things and not care about or understand the effects his words may have on anyone else. He also focuses only on his interests and will talk about them nonstop regardless of whether of not anyone understands or is interested in what he is talking about. As a child, it also caused him to say incredibly creepy things to me. He never said things with the purpose of scaring me, like most older brothers would, but rather, simply relayed things to me that he believed to be true. When I was 7 or 8, we were playing a video game together. Without even looking up from the screen, he said, "You know, when we're sleeping we can't control what we do. I could sleepwalk and get a knife and kill you and I wouldn't even know." When I told my mother what he'd said, she went to him and said he can't say things like that to his little sister because it scares me. His response was, "Why? It's true. She should know." I locked my door from then on. The creepiest thing he ever said still haunts me to this day. I was six or seven and our rooms were connected by a shared bathroom. We always kept the doors open, so we could see into each other's rooms. One day, while we were playing together, he mentioned how he saw his copy last night. I asked him what he meant, and he said that he frequently wakes up at night and sees a copy of himself standing beside his bed watching him sleep. I was freaked out and asked him what his copy looked like when it watched him. He jumped up and said, "I'll show you." He stood in front of me and stared blankly at me with no emotion on his face. I told him to stop and that he was scaring me. He said he didn't see why that would scare me since I've seen it before. I asked him what he meant by that and he said, "Sometimes, when I see my copy watching me, I look into your room and see yours watching you too." Even now, almost 20 years later, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a feeling of being watched. I keep my eyes closed or put my head under the blanket until the feeling passes, because I'm afraid to open my eyes, terrified that I will see a copy of myself blankly staring at me.

He would have been twelve now. Every year, on his birthday, I watch the last video I took of him. His eighth birthday, he was so happy. He played with his friends, blew out the candles, opened up his presents, then swung at the pinata. They never found out who drove the truck that hit him. Every year I try to get more answers from the police. Every year I bake a cake. Every year I watch that video. I always cry at the end, when everyone had left and he walks up to the camera and says, "Thank you, Daddy, I love you. I always will, never forget that." My television is stained from my tear-soaked hand print as I touch the screen, weeping. But for the first time in four years, I look up at the screen before the tape cuts out. He holds his hand against mine on the glass and smiles sadly at me.

The Letter. THE CHANGE.  The Lie.

I never thought I'd die alone.