Three Years From Vegas

That’s his shirt I’m wearing.

We we’re on one of the higher floors of the Wynn, in Las Vegas, looking out over a distant smooth desert, the sun was setting, the night was beginning to boil. Things we’re clicking. We’d gone out there with a large group of friends and met many more. We we’re on the mountain as it we’re; those last few of his summers, brilliant, brutal and wild, coming down slowly, figuring out every corner.

Two and half years is a lot of time when you’re young. There’s always something to teach. And that age difference, by default, ends up defining the role of an older brother. I don’t think it’s ever conscious, necessarily, but it’s something you work into over time. You watch and help, make the first mistakes, and I think try to make your own imprint. Try to impart some level of humanity that you find in yourself, if you can see it.

But really, your younger brother is your first friend. You show the way not just because you think you can, but because you need someone there with you along the way. You want someone to surf with, to fight with, to drink with, to entertain, to understand, to travel with and impress. Someone to quote movies with late on school nights, someone who remembers the little things about early life you may forget, and someone who will fill in the gaps of youth when your both old and frail. Someone who's child you'll one day meet, and who's wife you'll toast at a wedding. You never expect that person to be gone, and even if you did, it wouldn’t stop you from teaching all that you knew of the small but growing world around you. You are mirrors.

At some point though, right around the mid and early twenties, that two and half years I spoke of earlier shrinks. It happens in all forms of life. It no longer becomes your designed distinction; the obvious thing which allows one brother to have the experience ahead of the other. It’s just time, and small change time at that.

Everyone who had come out west on the trip with us was already on the Strip for one reason or another. I had been wandering around alone, taking in the sights for a while before our rocket-fueled night, regrouping from what had already been an entertaining and insane time. When I got up to the room Mike was getting ready: shirts tidily set-out and shoes tied. The right amount of class for a hundred dollar Vegas club on a Saturday night.  I, on the other hand, had brought with me one weathered and stained collared shirt.

“Your not going to wear that are you?” I remember him saying. “I don’t think they’ll let you in.”

I shrugged. It was all I had brought.

And I think he kind of rolled his eyes. I looked down at myself and panicked a bit. High up there in the American ether, where the big wave had rolled back, where illusion made itself real, where reality bent if you could follow it. I needed help.

He gave me his shirt. The one he’d been wearing when I walked in. I’m not certain how it fit me, and it actually looks a little baggy in that picture, but it worked. And he had a back-up of course (a few, actually), but when he gave me the shirt I’m not certain that was a consideration.

Two months later he’d be gone.

That Vegas trip is one of my last concrete and complex memories of him. I remember the night we we’re flying in, Mike and I we’re sitting next to each other, and for the first time we both saw the desert lights flooding the valleys created by dry peaky mountains. It was another adventure.

I remember drunkenly riding that roller coaster, taking pictures in front of the Bellagio, generally being tourists, and more generally, being close and strong. Emerging from a lifetime of being siblings, and truly becoming brothers. It didn’t start on that trip; it had been happening for years.

And I remember that picture. I think my good friend Jon took it, but it's hard to say, could have been a lot of people. And I still can’t look at it. In fact, I can’t look at many of his pictures, and certainly none that we are in together. But this one has always stood out in my mind; a beacon of us both being on the edge of new reality, and neither know it.

His death is a constant in my life, and always will be, and as the years pass by, this being the third, it does grow more distant. As does the memory of him. The pieces of time that go by seem to isolate me, but when the past comes back, when his life returns to my mind, as it does constantly, it hits me harder, and from a space that confuses and hurts even more.

I don’t think I can write about him publicly, and in this format, any longer. Perhaps I will in the future, but for now, this is all I can do in written word. He deserves better out of me then I currently have available. He deserves to be with us all still. And there isn’t much more to say then that, and I'm not sure if there is any meaningful introspection that I can continue to add without repeating myself. 

What you see in that picture is the last stage we got to, the final level of our lives. He was giving me his shirt; he was the one who would keep an eye on me going forward. And I think he had a lot to teach me. What you see in my eyes, and what I felt in that instant, was pride: not just at the man he’d become, but as the friend I had for decades to come. My brother, someone who time will never forget and neither will those who knew him. Now he’s somewhere I am not, somewhere I can never understand, and the more I think on it, almost certainly no where.

And I miss him.