I see my timeline on this site:

2014
From my older brother's diagnosis
to the death of my grandmother

2015
Falling in love with you
My brother disappearing

2017
To the breaking of trust in exchange of fluids
Never receiving what the law calls justice

2018
Realizing you were never my first love
Merely my first attachment

But I never wrote about finding my brother
dead
in the woods near the main road
white bones in a tent
not knowing who it was
only realizing after the police left my mother crying
for him
dying there alone in the woods so close to home

I cry for him
dying there alone.
Hidden by the wilderness
rotting away inside the plastic tarp.

I cried for him
and wrote for you.
This timeline is my reminder
holding my guilty conscience accountable.

He was not good company in my despair.
But he was company and he was the only company I had.
I share that night with him.
Only him.

We were the only two that breathed oxygen from the air I screamed in.
The only two who felt the blows exchanged by fists.
We were the only two who shared that time and space.
No matter who and how many people I tell my story,
he will still be the only one who was actually there.

We are connected.
We are connected and I don't know how to free myself from these memories.
Free myself from this Hell.

I do not miss him. Nor do I miss myself as a victim.
I'm neither suffering nor melancholic.
Nothing pulls me back.
Nothing at all, except that I was whole.
Maybe I was a victim, but at least I was something.
Maybe it was painful, but at least I felt something.