Now presenting, The Amazing Fuck Up! | [None is the Best Number of Years]

Friday, Mar. 08, 2013
4:30 a.m.
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Four thirty in the AM in what would be a tropical paradise if it only had the tropical and the paradise and it weren't the middle of fucking March. I stayed up til midnight thirty drinking, then drunk reading in the lobby, then drunk asking the clerk for another key to my parents' room (which totally worked even though it totally shouldn't have--guy hadn't seen me before, hadn't seen me with my parents, and didn't ask for ID or even my name). Then I drunk hopped a fence and drunk walked along the beach, then slept for three hours, and now I'm awake again listening to my baby bro (not such a baby anymore, they tell me) sleep next to me. Like maybe if I stay awake long enough, an hour from now won't come and he won't have to get up and leave for Georgia. Like if I listen hard enough to his gentle breathing, I get to keep my baby bro, I can smuggle him back to our childhood where we'll play Super Nintendo games for the rest of forever. I know it doesn't really work like that, though, and that in fifty-four more minutes his alarm will go off, and he'll put on his Navy-issued dress blues, and then he'll leave us for three years.

Fifty-two minutes, now.

This one time in kindergarten, my mom came to my class to volunteer and brought my baby bro. My brother and I sat on the floor and played with big wooden blocks. A large, loud blond lady stormed in and took my brother by the hand and said, "There you are! You're coming with me." She was not nice about it. Four year old me, with my amazing breadth of coping mechanisms, started to cry. Mom turned and asked what was wrong. "My brother!" I finally managed to choke, "Some lady took my brother!" There's a happy ending, clearly, since I'm crying about my brother leaving now and not my brother murdered in a ditch somewhere at three years old, but this feels how that felt. All the terror that maybe bad things are happening to him and maybe I'll never see him again and I'll be left here alone with my guilt, this is exactly the same feeling I had when some stranger stole my brother. Except now it's the government stealing him, and I can't fix this by crying louder and pointing.

Damned if I won't try, though.

I have forty-five minutes left.