Collection of One Shot's

When I grow up.

When I grow up I want to be as brave as my big brother.

My name is Marshall and I live in the state of South Carolina in the United States of America and I am fourteen years old. I am in high school and I have been looking forward to this project for a while now because I want to tell you the story of my big brother Harley. Harley is five years older than me and this might sound unusual because I imagine most brothers don’t get along very well, but I love my brother more than anything.

His story is a difficult one and it is something he never should have gone through but my mother says that people don’t know him like we do so they judge him. She told me that because people spend so much time in church that they think are god almighty themselves when they’re not and they have no right to judge.

I am going to try and share the story with you how I remember it, hopefully conveying the way I felt for Harley at the time and I hope that you will believe me when I say that he is my hero. So here it goes….

Really as things turned out I should probably resent Harley I lost a lot because of his revelation but I couldn’t ever hate someone who just wanted to be themselves. You see my brother is a homosexual and mum says in these parts people just don’t understand people like Harley so they are cruel and judgemental.

In the beginning he was very depressed, he hadn’t told anyone at this point and he wouldn’t talk to any of us when we asked him what was wrong. I was only ten back then and he told me that I was too young to understand and that our parents wouldn’t either. He tried to run away a few times but he always returned because what fifteen year old could survive on their own?

I would hear him crying at night and when he did eventually sleep his dreams didn’t sound pleasant because sometimes I could hear him groaning or shouting out. He was struggling with something but he wouldn’t tell me and I wondered if it was school, I remembered thinking if that was the case then I never wanted to go to high school.

Despite only being fifteen he would always seem to get his hands on alcohol and on the weekends he would disappear for hours on end to get drunk. My parents didn’t know this but he told me time and time again that this world was a horrible place and he no longer wanted to be a part of it. I was too young to fully understand what he was getting at but the idea of him going anywhere terrified me and I told my mum hoping she would force him to stay.

It didn’t work though he was too afraid to tell them what the problem was and my father decided he was just trying to rebel and punished him for it. He just closed off even more after that and I swore to keep my mouth shut from then on because I didn’t want him to leave us.

He came home drunk one night and I snuck into his room to see if he was ok and he told me that he had a dual personality.  He told me that part of him wanted to tell everyone what was wrong and stand proud but the other half of him was so disgusted by it that he’d rather die. I began to cry at that point because I didn’t want him to die I loved him and when he noticed that I was crying he assured me he was too much of a coward to follow through with it.

I didn’t feel any better by that admission because to me he would still leave me if he was strong enough too and I wanted him to want to stay with me. I wanted to know why my big brother hated himself so much that he thought about dying?!