My Only Regret
   
I woke up to three loud bangs on the door. My apartment was dimly lit so it was hard to decipher the shapes in the room. I stumbled around my bedroom trying to find my glasses as the banging continued. The banging was urgent and the taps close together. The person on the other side of my shabby apartment door needed to speak to me right away. This gave me a crushing feeling that something was very wrong. It took twelve bangs for me to open the door. After seeing what was on the other side, I sometimes wish I never did.
On the other side of the door was my mother. The woman, who despite giving birth to me, has pretty much ignored me since I was seven. It was my father, however, that confused me the most. My father and I have never been close, I have never even liked him very much. The fact that either of them made the three-hour drive was significant enough. But the fact that both of them were there meant that something was wrong. My mother and I still talk on occasion, but I haven’t spoken to my father since I left home. The three of us spent what felt like five minutes staring at each other before anyone spoke. I was the first to break the silence,
“Mom?” I asked, eyebrows furrowing
“Your brother is sick. Get in the car,” she responded, with a concerning lack of worry in her voice.
My mother explained everything to me on the way to the hospital while my dad remained cold and silent. My brother, who was fourteen at the time, had attempted to kill himself.
“I didn’t expect this out of him. He was always such a happy kid. I don’t know where this came from,” she said.
At the time, I thought this quite odd. How could she not notice? How can someone not notice a change like that in their kid? In hindsight, I understand now. She could never understand what it is like to live under their roof. Never understand the loneliness, the anger, the frustration. I was searching for something to say, something that would make her understand. I still harbored a lot of unresolved feelings towards her from my time at home. Anything I wanted to say was replaced by anger, “Of course you don’t know where it came from. Lord knows you never payed attention to me.”
My mother shifted around uncomfortably in her seat. It seemed there was nothing quite like four years of repressed anger to make a car ride awkward. “You might be living on your own, but it would behoove of you to not talk to me like that. I’m still your mother,” she retorted.
How dare she. How dare she act like that. She has never acted like a mother to me. She has never been my mother, I thought. I knew better. I knew what my brother was feeling. Everything he was feeling, I had already felt before. I resonated so much with him, which scared me. The thought of him experiencing the same childhood I had, didn’t sit right with me. I knew how difficult it was for me, how bad was it for him?
It was another agonizing two and a half hours before we arrived at the hospital.
“You two need to wait outside. You are the last people he wants to see right now,” I said as soon as we got to his room.
“How could you possibly know that?” my dad asked, speaking to me for the first time in years.
“I lived with you two for 18 years; I know what it is like. Believe me, he doesn’t want to see you,” I snapped.
The image of my brother when I walked into his room will be burned into my retinas forever. He looked so fragile, the most fragile I have ever seen another human being. He was hooked up to all these wires and tubes that were connected to other machines. Above all, he looked tired, really, really tired. It wasn’t physical exhaustion, though, it was emotional exhaustion. I looked at him and saw it in his eyes; he was so empty. I could see that he wanted to feel something, any emotion at all, but there was nothing left of him. I saw so much pain in his eyes, but I also saw so much of myself in them. The degree of similarity between us still terrifies me to this day.
My brother and I talked well into the night and he explained everything to me. My parents, for once in my entire twenty-four years, listened to me and stayed out of the room. My mother only came in once and checked on the both of us, with the still incredible lack of concern I saw before.
“I never wanted any of this to happen. I never intended for the razor to cut so deep. I don’t actually want to die, I’m just kind of tired of living. I don’t know… am I making any sense?” he muttered, voice hoarse.
“No, I get it. I’ve been there with them. I've been at that point with them before. I know what it’s like,” I respond, stroking his forehead.
“It just became too much. The fighting, the drinking, the yelling, all of it. I decided the effort of living wasn’t worth it, I guess. I didn’t realize what that cost, though,” he said. There were a few minutes of steady breaths from me and labored breaths from him before he spoke again. “You left me, Diana. You left me with them. You left me alone. Why? What did I do?” His words racked through me like a shiver on a cold day. They rattled every bone in my body and twisted my stomach into knots.
It was then that I realized what I had done when I left home six years ago, I also left him. I was so busy trying to get out of that house and away from my parents that I did not give a second thought to my brother. I was so busy with my own issues towards them that I left without a second thought. In the process, I left him. I left him alone with our parents, to deal with them himself. In the seconds that followed my brother’s question, I decided what my life would be. I had always struggled to find who I would be, what I would be when I grew up. I decided then; I knew then.  My brother was never going back to that house, not one foot. I would become his legal guardian, and that was it. There was no arguing, no discussion, no anything. When I told my parents, they were less than thrilled, but didn't put up much of a fight.
We went back to my apartment as soon as he was healthy enough. After he collected his stuff, neither of us stepped foot back in that house again. Right before we left, though, my brother and I got our last words in; the words we were dreaming of all our lives.
“I left him when I left you. I’m never doing that again.” I said, looking directly at my father.
“You ruined me. There are scars on my body that will never fade. I’m never looking back, never,” he seethed. He had a degree of fury that I never hope to see on him again.
I’ve learned that a life with regrets is no life at all. Leaving my brother in that house on his own, that is my only regret.