My little brother & Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero
As my mom says, America has theirs, and now we do too; my little brother Fanfan died in a motorcycle accident about 18 minutes from home on 9/11. Since receiving that call from my older brother Andy, thousands of thoughts have raced through my mind, and I’ve felt feelings and sensations I did not know were possible. Some days, I do not know how I’ll get from one second to the next.
Somehow, I do, and immediately begin to experience awe: How can we human beings live with this much pain in our hearts | bodies | spirits and also experience such deep, unrelenting joy | love | understanding?
Although I mostly feel like remnants of a person, tonight I feel somewhat complete writing to you from the living room couch in my family’s Monroe, New York, home. I know that collective “you” is down one person — my little brother. He read all my emails, even the last one in which I paralleled the shadow sides of my mom with my friend-boss Brian’s love.
Knowing Fanfan read that email and we didn’t get to talk about it has lived in my mind. Did he know to what extent Andy and I got the worst bits of her and he the best? Was he angry with me for writing so openly about those parts of our mother? And most importantly, what about me; what about the shadow sides of me?
“Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy…
