This story is called Me, Broken.
After three months of remembering and reliving the hell of last year, I’ve decided to write it down. I don’t know if it will help. Brett said I should try. So I will.
This began one year and six months ago. There was a funeral. I was not new to funerals. I had attended four. But I had been younger then, and the funerals had never been for my brother.
Mom, then a healthy and vibrant woman of 37 years, slumped, sobbing uncontrollably, as the coffin carrying my Tommy was lowered into the hole in the ground that would be his final resting place. My sister, characteristically stoic, stared straight ahead, refusing to give in to the tragedy. I was somewhere in the middle. I liked to think of myself as a fighter, but my brother had died, which made the whole ‘fighter’ thing somewhat difficult.
The clouds that had been gathering overhead for the past ten minutes or so burst open, drenching us in seconds. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed. Dr. Stevens, our pastor, glanced up nervously. Thunderstorms could mean tornados.
He lead the gathering in prayer. I don’t remember it well. I mumbled words, but nothing that stuck. I was too busy fuming over my father’s absence.
My father, John Wilson, had abandoned the family when my mother became pregnant with me. Apparently, he wasn’t a fan of having any more children, so he left. Southern grace, huh? Anyway, we’d all tried to contact him, thinking that even he would show up at his son’s funeral, but our efforts were to no avail. He was absent throughout the entire service. In fact, not one person in the town of Randall, Mississippi knew where he was.
There were rumors that he had run off to Jackson or Memphis, or even as far as New York or Chicago. No one knew where he was. His family, the Wilsons, had essentially run Randall. The police chief, the mayor, and the local judge were all Wilsons. But after the embarrassing disappearance of John Wilson, Randall had gone over to the Wilson family’s rival, the Stevens family.
We became the poorest family in Randall. My mother descended into depression. It became difficult to pay the bills. We were treated like outsiders. And in Randall, that’s not good. Our family’s decline had seemingly culminated in the death of my brother, Tommy, in an apparent suicide. It felt as if we could go no further down. We were wrong.
iwishthingswerebetter 