WATTYS 2021 HORROR WINNER!
Diego's life has spiraled since the gruesome death of his brother Miguel, and moving to a new town right before his senior year definitely wasn't on his to-do list. Oh, yeah, and neither was saving the world from a centur...
The pages crackle as I open the book, sitting down in my desk chair. It isn't hard to find the marked page—it's the last one with any writing on it, about three-fourths of the way through the journal. At the top, there's a date. A date so close to one that I've seen over and over again, on funeral service cards, on his tombstone, on hospital bills strewn mournfully on Mom's office desk.
This was written just a day before the accident. His pencil touched the page on that Friday and wrote for the last time.
5/3/91
Finally got the balls to ask Jen out, and she said yes to getting ice cream after school on Tuesday. Might be able to convince Kristie to double with us and Eddie. He'll owe me big if I can pull it off.
I know Dad doesn't like friends, or dates, or anything cutting into my practice time, but there's no way I'm not going. I guess I'll also have to get the balls to tell him that. I don't know why standing up to them is so hard for me. Diego does it all the time.
I pause to re-read those last two sentences over and over, trying to make sure I'm understanding. Miguel thought I stood up to Mom and Dad?
Maybe not straight to their face or anything, but he doesn't let them control his every move like I do. The other day he told me he doesn't think he'll try out for the baseball team next year like it was no big deal. Like he didn't even worry about them being upset.
The conversation we had in the living room pops into my head as if it was yesterday, despite the fact that I never gave it a second thought until now. I was drawing while he was watching SportsCenter. Something on TV made him ask me about baseball—I think he was commending a knuckleball I threw a while back. And I shrugged and told him I didn't really have fun with it the past season, and I probably wasn't going to try out again next year. That I wanted to join the after-school art club instead.
The thing is, I love soccer. But sometimes I wish I didn't. Sometimes I wish I wanted to do anything else, just to see what Mom and Dad would say about it. To see if I could even get the nerve to tell them in the first place. When Dad gets in one of his moods and starts laying on the pressure, sometimes I even wish I'd tear my acl or something.
I guess it doesn't really matter. I love soccer and they love that I'm good at it. I should be happy. I'm just glad Diego isn't getting caught up in their expectations the way I do sometimes. He wants to do art and he's doing it, no matter what they think. I should probably learn something from that. But I probably won't.
It ends there. I read it over a few times, trying to hold on to the way it almost feels like talking to him again. I can hear everything in his voice so clearly, even though most of it is stuff I never would have expected him to say.
He wasn't as happy as I thought he was. And while I spent every day looking up to him, every day since his death trying to be him, he wanted, at least in one way, to be more like me. Because I didn't let Mom and Dad stop me from going after what I knew I wanted.
I'd been so optimistic back then, too—I had so much to look forward to, I thought. It's so different from how I've felt since Miguel's death that it feels like years ago rather than months.
But it's not just from the loss of my brother, is it? The ache from that is a different kind of grief. What I've felt lately has been about something else entirely. The mourning of my past hopes, the pain of discarding dreams of a future that I actually cared about.
I look up from the page, eyes falling on the baseball bat leaning up against the wall. I don't have to contemplate it—I know Miguel is right. In the only way he could, he told me that I'm wrong for trying to fit into his mold. That he never wanted to fit it in the first place.
I have to do what's right for me. Not for Mom, Dad, or even Miguel. I have to do what's in my heart.
I'm lucky, I think as I stand, to know exactly what that means.
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I hope you guys are having a good day! Diego's is certainly looking better than his yesterday, which is a weird thing to say considering everything he expects to happen tonight 😅
also I can't believe next month is already Camp NaNoWriMo again 😳 gonna film a prep-month video for youtube bc I am not ready at AWLLL 🤡
