Ignominious Desecration

Ignominious Desecration

My brother and I, we’re inseparable. Twins you see, it’s so often the case. We’ve lived a hard life together. Put up with a great many hardships caused by viciously small-minded folk who claim status in the humiliation of others.
Let me state first, and I want this to be perfectly clear in your minds, that I love my brother. Love him more than anyone else on Earth though you shall soon learn that I have had more reason then any to loath him. Right from the start he had problems coming to terms with life. His tantrums were like minor mental brakes where he became totally cut off from the outside world and simply gave himself over to the wailing, screaming fits. He could go on like that for hours and as I was always closest to him it fell to me to calm him down. Our parents never understood how to deal with him, with either of us really but mostly him.
I always found a freedom of spirit in knowledge. The idea that information could be sucked up and stored in the brain with next to no leakage, (at least until old age begins to bite), astounded me from an early age. I remember lying awake long after my brother had gone to sleep tingling with questions, desperate for the answers that my parents could not provide and wondering to myself where in the design of the brain all the information was stored. My image of millions of towering rows of shelves holding all the knowledge we ever gleam during our lives and every thought we ever conceive never seemed to fit with the picture presented to me of the grey sponge like mass that is our brain.
My brother on the other hand seemed to take particular delight in learning as little as possible, though he was obviously, overtly bright in his sharp conversational manner. He actively avoided committing anything to memory, the most obvious and in my opinion, most exasperating and down right rude example was his refusal to remember people’s names. He simply never addressed anyone at all by his or her name, even me, though I was different, I always new when he wanted to talk to me. He would either get by with eye contact to attract attention or more often just not bother at all and only respond to those people brave enough to go through the trauma of engaging him in conversation.
To say that he became more difficult with age would never convey the strength of feeling and the depths of despair that the usual accoutrements of age brought with them. The main one being of course alcohol, that abhorrent, vicious poison that so enamours such a vast proportion of modern society.
His discovery of this liquid be it in any form, he was not particular, caused - causes a relentless agony that compounds other miseries whilst encompassing and finally engulfing them to create a leviathan of self-loathing and wonton nialism. His vitriol knew no bounds when in the midst of one of his seemingly endless binges.
We were now in our early twenties and I was desperate to obtain my degree in philosophy but my brother had by this time given himself completely to drink, his life’s only real dedication and the only thing he ever truly directed his full attention on.
I found out that things could have been worse. I already knew this through my studies but I got to experience the plunge that leaves one utterly drained when you feel that you have already hit bottom. The realisation that there is always further to fall is something that strikes with the force of a battering ram making one physically ill but also, more importantly destroying the mind, spinning you into the dangerous spiral of depression and self-pity.
My catalyst to reach that point of desolation was when he began to mess about with the fast track drugs. Booze is bad but it cripples slowly whereas heroin can get the job done so quickly the user sometimes wonders if they haven’t died without noticing and slipped into someone else’s life. One day they look about and ask themselves where have all their possessions gone, or they look in the mirror and the decrepit face that stares back is unrecognisable.
That was the lowest ebb, for both of us, but brought forth my only real achievement, or the one that gives me the greatest sense of accomplishment. It was one of the only times in my life that I truly got through to him. Somehow through the haze of endless drink and dirty highs he saw that I was desperate and he knew he had to stop, his abuse was killing us both.
Getting over the pitiful desire for opiate was nearly as bad as the drug. The withdrawal brought back fierce reminders of our childhood and his marathon tantrums but with enough help and support and time sooner or later everything has its end, (though I learnt in philosophy that this is a statement that some could debate for weeks), and he did get better.
For almost half a year he did not even drink. I think that the painful effects of his body extricating the drug had finally scared him so badly that he saw what I had always seen. That life, no matter the circumstance, was always worth living. There was always something to be gained, a reason to suffer, some kind of balance of payments to be found. One had to first look in the correct places though and for those six months of calm he understood that oblivion contained just that, nothing, at least nothing to inspire a fulfilling existence.
During that happy peaceful period I managed to get more work done then I had in the previous three years and although I could not catch up enough to receive my diploma I achieved my goal. I did not need a piece of paper to tell me what I did and did not know. I had been studying to learn, to gain knowledge and every new fact had given me more pleasure than any number of letters after my name.
But just as the bad time had come to an end, so did this fruitful lull. The human brain has an amazing ability to block out past pain, the most common example being the drinker who swears, ‘Never again,’ during a particularly stubborn hangover but can often be seen later that night with a glass in their hand, all thought of earlier discomfort happily consigned to the past.
His drinking began again despite my attempts to obviate. I always knew that he was likely to relapse and after my numerous attempts to restrain him failed I regretfully had to except the circumstance and be thankful that heroin had been abandoned for good.
So that is how it was at that is how it has been for the past fifteen years until now. You see my brother has finally succumbed to the constant abuse of a life spent living in a bottle and he has been dead for nearly ten minutes.
I will not cry for him, for I shall soon follow. I may not have been clear from the start, not intentional, I am just going through a great deal at the moment. When I said that my brother and I were inseparable what I meant was that the doctors could not separate us without the loss of one or both of our lives. We are Siamese twins, joined, believe it or not, by our fused forehead that is attached as far down as the place where my right eye should be. So whilst we share completely different organs I am afraid that my old heart can never sustain the pressure needed to circulate the blood around both mine and my deceased brothers body, not that I would ever contemplate living in that manner even if it were an option.
I was the smaller of the two of us and was born without the use of my legs and one of my arms so had to be dragged about on a stand with wheels. I bear my brother no grudge, we lived far longer then any of the doctors credited us with and I got the chance to taste both the highs and lows of life. The experiences my brother inadvertently forced upon me were as greater learning devices as the books I read and the debates I attended. After all, you can never know the addiction we felt merely by reading this short passage or the understanding that comes from being literally attached, so I refuse to demonise him. In his way he contributed to my life as much as I to his.
Going now, I can feel it, another new experience courtesy of life. Despite what some may assume I got more out of it then many. When I think about it, I got to live two.

End