I Can Change Your Life

Tony tried to spend as much time as he could with me, but it was difficult with another tour rapidly approaching. He was in and out of my house a million times a day, leaving me sitting on the couch with whatever he had placed in front of me to eat. I liked to imagine that I was getting better – that being in my home was becoming easier, but everybody knew that was just wishful thinking. I was getting worse. I was falling into a deep hole, slowing dumping off my sanity and friendships and overall well-being with each level I descended. Maybe if I dug myself deep enough, I would find myself reunited with the only person who actually mattered so far in my existence.

I thought that once Marky was laid to rest in the beautiful cemetery in Point Loma, near the San Diego coast, that I would be able to let this all go. I knew that it wouldn’t completely disappear – the pain would still be there, but I never thought that it would get worse over time. Weren’t things supposed to get better after so long? Would things ever get better?

The front door clicked and I knew that Tony was back from his afternoon band practice. I quickly picked up the bag of potato chips that were sitting in front of me and put them on my lap as I tried to pretend to be interested in whatever was on the television.

“Hey,” Tony said with a long sigh as he carefully sat down on the couch beside me.

He kissed the top of my head and I instantly closed my eyes and relished in the moment. Tony had told me several days prior, when he found me in the hallway, not to forgive him as easily as I wanted to. When I first heard those words, I thought they were ridiculous. Of course I would forgive him easily. Of course I would give in to the feelings I had for Tony, no matter what kind of fight we had been in. But I was wrong. Forgiving him wasn’t as easy as I expected. There was a barrier between us now - a slight wedge in our relationship that was distancing me from him.

I looked down at the chips in my lap and pushed them away so they were sitting on the other side of me. My appetite just wasn’t there anymore.

“How was band practice?” I asked, pulling the sleeves of my jacket down as a chill crept over my pale skin.

Tony eyed me carefully, giving me a confused look. “It was fine…” he paused for a moment and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “How the hell are you cold? Meedie, it’s like a sauna in here.”

“Oh, maybe that’s because you were just outside,” I tried, shrugging my shoulders. “It’s a lot cooler outside now that it’s getting later.”

“Do you even know what time it is?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It has to be sometime after four. Because Cops doesn’t come on until four o’clock.”

Tony chuckled a bit and nudged me with his shoulder as he stood up and began to head into the kitchen. He began to rummage through the cupboards and fridge, looking for something to fix for dinner, I assumed.

“How were those chips?” Tony asked from the kitchen. I heard the clicking of the stove before the sound of the gentle ignite of the flames.

I furrowed my eyebrows. “Huh?” I responded. I picked up the remote and began to flick through the channels, finally deciding to land on MTV to see what music videos were playing. It was the same as usual – no videos at all. Just some over-dramatized reality show.

“Those chips,” Tony poked his head out around the corner, pointing to the bag of chips that were sitting next to me on the couch. The bag that I had picked up in order to trick Tony into believing that I was actually attempting to eat something.

“Oh yeah,” I nodded. “They’re fine. You want some?” I began to reach for the bag but Tony shook his head.

“No, it’s okay. I just wanted to know. I was a bit iffy on the flavor, but Jaime insisted that I try them so I went ahead and grabbed them. They really don’t sound good at all.”

I bit my lip and lifted the bag, afraid to see what flavor I had tried. The bag was blue, and I didn’t even need to read the title of the flavor, because I saw the picture and that was all I needed to send my stomach into a fit of cramps and flips, my mouth growing slimy as I could feel myself growing sick.

“Chicken and waffles…” I muttered to myself as I stared at the bag. Just as Tony came walking around the corner holding two bowls, I was darting down the hall and towards the bathroom. Tony called after me, asking me what was wrong as he set down whatever food he had prepared.

Tears began to fill my eyes as I hurried down the hallway – I was afraid that I wasn’t going to make it to the toilet in time. Just as I was about to turn into the bathroom, my foot caught on something and my body flew forward, my momentum causing me to crash into the door and crack it open. I looked down to see my toes covered in dust and filth, gathered from the bags that I had tripped over in the hall. Marky’s bags. My toes tingled and eventually went completely numb – a combination of having rammed them into the duffel bag and from running after I hadn’t even stood up since that morning.

I pulled my knees closer to my chest so I could gain control over my body again. I sat up on my knees and gently dusted myself off, looking down at myself as I did so. My eyes caught a glimpse of something shiny sitting on the carpeted floor. It was clear that I hadn’t fallen into the bathroom, and there was no way I had managed to fly down the hall and run into my room; that means there was only one room left in the house.

My hands began to shake as my mouth suddenly went dry – my urge to vomit was still there, but it was masked with my shock of the situation. The room was dark and musky. I could feel his presence crawling on my skin. I could smell his cologne as if he had just sprayed it before heading out for a date with one of his many women friends. I could hear him cursing as he broke a string on his acoustic guitar. He was there. He was everywhere in that room and even if I could shake him, he would still be there. It was where he lived: it was Marky’s sanctuary.

The comforter on his bed was still pulled back, the pillow rumpled after the last time he had slept on it, the sheets wrinkled and slightly pulled off from the mattress on the corner closest to his nightstand that still held a half-empty cup of water. The window above his bed showed the parking lot of the neighboring apartment complex, and if you looked far enough you could see the wavering blue of the ocean. The ocean that was just beside where Marky’s body rest. Kind of ironic, having a view of your grave from your very own bedroom. I almost laughed at the cryptic irony, but my laughter ceased when I saw the pictures that covered his ceiling. There were tons of them. I had never taken notice of them before – had I ever really been in Marky’s room before? As I stared at all of the glossy photos that were lined on the ceiling, I came to realize that I had never really been inside of Marky’s room.

Marky was always a very private person, for obvious reasons, though. I’m sure he didn’t want me just barging into his room when he had some of his girls over or when he was snorting lines. Did he ever do drugs in his room? I was too afraid to look around for any traces of the powder that killed him, so I continued to stare at the pictures. They were mostly pictures of our band on tour or pictures of our teenage years with Vic and Mike. But there was one picture that really caught my attention: one picture that was different from the rest. It was a picture that my mom had taken of us on her old Polaroid camera.

I could still remember the day she brought the camera home – it was a new amazing technology to my mother: she grew up with close to nothing and so being able to afford any kind of camera was a huge accomplishment for her. It was when my mother was clean: both in the world of substances and her sanity. It was before she went from boyfriend to boyfriend. It was before she gave up on us and herself. It was a time when we were happy – even if my father wasn’t around. She was showing us a glimpse of a normal life.

The day she brought that camera home, she used up all of the film she had for it. She took several pictures of Marky and I. Out of the eleven pictures she took, this was the only one to make it through the years. I thought that they were lost during one of our many moves, but I guess Marky had managed to salvage one of them. And there it was, taped to his ceiling in a sea of memories.

“Woah.”

I didn’t jump at the sound of Tony’s voice, but I was slightly startled by it. I closed my eyes and let out a long breath to ease my nerves. Being alone in the room and observing seemed so surreal. Like it wasn’t really happening and I was just living in my mind. But having Tony in the room brought me back to the fact that I was in Marky’s bedroom.

“Those are a lot of pictures,” Tony said, a hint of a smile in his voice as I assumed he had found himself in one of the photos. Marky and Tony were best friends, I was certain that Tony would be in a decent amount of photos. I could hear Tony slightly chuckling to himself every now and then as he slowly moved around the room, staring at the ceiling.

I turned to look at Tony as he seemed to feel so comfortable in the room. It wasn’t even phasing him – did he even realize where we were? The deep blue walls with unfamiliar posters and decorations brought me a great deal of uneasiness. I felt that I was invading Marky’s privacy – I was trespassing into his second life; the life where he slept with nameless girls and did drugs and partied until he couldn’t see anymore. There had to be a reason why Marky didn’t want me in his secret life – either to protect me from the reality of his addiction, or to keep me in the dark about something. No matter what the reason was, I was going to respect his wish and stay out of that part of his life.

Tony continued to step around the room. Each of his steps caused me to flinch – my heartbeat increasing to levels that I didn’t even know existed. I felt like my chest was going to explode with how constricted it felt.

“W-we shouldn’t be in here,” I blurted out. My words fell so quickly out of my mouth that my throat wasn’t ready for it, causing my voice to crack a bit. I couldn’t keep my mouth closed as I breathed any longer – my breaths were long, labored and shaky.

Tony turned to look at me, his expression dropping slightly as he heard the panic and fear in my voice. “What is it?” His eyebrows furrowed when he realized how ridiculous his question was. “It’s okay, Meedie, don’t worry. This is good to be –“

“We need to get out. This is Marky’s room. He doesn’t like me in his room. It’s not okay, we need to get out now.” I couldn’t focus on anything in the room as I shook my head back and forth, shaking it all away from me. I tried to shake the images of his unmade bed and the waiting glass of water from my mind, but I knew that when I opened my eyes, I would see them again. I would see the last traces of Marky’s body on his sheets and his glass of water that he probably drank out of right before he left the house for what he didn’t know was going to be forever. There was probably a lip print on the edge of the glass. There was probably an outline of Marky’s sleeping body on his mattress. It’s like he was there. This was all that was left of him – some DNA on a water glass and his indentation on a mattress.

“Meedie,” Tony placed his hands on my shoulders. “Relax, Meedie. You need to calm down. It’s okay, really.”

“No, no, no,” I muttered continuously. I stopped my shaking and looking right into Tony’s eyes. I could see how gentle they were – how they wanted to calm me down, but I couldn’t fall into them anymore. Not like I used to. He couldn’t calm me down like he used to. “It’s not okay, god dammit. It’s not fucking okay!” I growled, my teeth clenched and my neck extended.

“We need to get out,” I screamed, emphasizing the last word of my statement. “Out, now! OUT.”

Tony stepped back just a bit, but kept his hands on my shoulders. “Why? What the hell is going on?”

“Marky doesn’t let me in his room like this! I can’t be in here, what the fuck. Marky will be so pissed.”

“Do you even hear yourself? Marky isn’t here, Meedie.”

“I know…”

“No, Meedie, look around. He isn’t here! You need to grasp that. He’s not in this room.”

I shook my head. “Yes, he is, Tony! You don’t see him? You don’t hear him?”

Tony looked at my quizzically, his eyes drooping and his lips slightly parted.

“I can smell his cologne,” I breathed out, tears slowly streaming down my face. “I can hear the echo of his acoustic guitar bouncing off the fucking walls. I can feel him looking at me – he lives in every one of these posters. His imprint is on his mattress for Christ’s sake. He’s fucking here, Tony. He’s here but he’s fucking dead.”

I dropped to my knees, clutching my head between my hands. My right hand began to gently thumb the side of my head. “Why can’t I get him out?” I said between clenched teeth. My entire face was drenched in my tears and my stomach was burning and my chest was heaving. “He lives inside my fucking head.”

Tony kneeled beside me, but didn’t touch me. “Meedie, it’s okay for him to live within you. That’s how this works – that whole ‘he’s dead but he’ll never leave you’ kind of thing. This is what that is. He’s your brother – you’re connected whether you’re dead or alive.”

I didn’t feel connected to Marky though. His presence was haunting. “How am I supposed to ever move on if I feel like he’s here but his grave tells me otherwise?”

“You can’t force it. You don’t have to move on yet; you just need to learn how to live with it. With time you move on,” Tony said softly, “trust me.”

Did I trust Tony? How could I trust Tony after the way he had treated me while he was drunk? I couldn’t know for sure if Tony was over it, because it was clear that something was bothering him deep down. It was unknown how Tony would act the next time he was drunk – would he lash out at me again? Push me away?

I knew that I was guilty of doing the same thing while I was drunk. I shut people out and only believed what was in my head and not in my heart. I looked down at my left wrist where I could see my tattoo sticking out from underneath my sleeve. Where Marky’s name was once swirled onto my skin was now a mess of lines interrupted by the scars I had carved into my skin, replacing my brother’s name with the word ‘Liar.’

I did stupid things while I was drunk – my entire life was one stupid blur because of how drunk I would get. Even a majority of my high school days are blurred out and the only thing I have to go off of is what Mike and Vic told me about them. I couldn’t even remember some nights I spent with my brother because of alcohol.

“When was the last time I drank?” I asked quietly.

Tony paused for a moment, both confused by my sudden subject change and also trying to think back. “I honestly can’t remember. Did you drink during the last week you were on tour with us?”

I didn’t know the answer to that, but I certainly know that it had been close to a month that I had been completely sober. I knew that I was an alcoholic, but maybe my severe depression and mood swings had a lot to do with my lack of alcohol. Or maybe I was just making excuses.

My mind was in turmoil as I took one last glance around the room. Too much was happening and my body couldn’t keep up. My nausea caught up to me and I quickly darted out of the room, my left foot catching on the strap of the backpack by Marky’s door. I couldn’t slow down though, so I yanked my foot off, causing the bag to rip open as I hurried across the hall and into the bathroom.

I leaned over the toilet and began to heave – only a painful bile coming up from my stomach. Why was I throwing up? Why was I so nauseas and disturbed? Why couldn’t I just move on?

Tony’s hand was tracing light circles on my back to comfort me. The feeling wasn’t overwhelming, but I had to admit that I did feel a bit smothered at the moment. I felt like I was being suffocated by life and everything in it.

“I guess you didn’t really eat those chips,” Tony commented as he noticed that lack of food I was spitting up into the toilet. “You could have just told me.”

I didn’t feel like arguing with Tony, and I knew that if I said anything in my defense, I would shut down and go into fight mode. I managed to compose myself and asked Tony if I could be alone to shower and clean myself up. He agreed and said that he was just going to head out anyway because he had plans to meet up with a friend of his that was a realtor to see about moving back to San Diego to be closer to not only me, but the rest of the band.

Tony left and I quickly brushed my teeth and scrubbed down every part of my body before wrapping a fluffy towel around my body and stepping out of the bathroom. Not even a full stride out the door and I was already stepping on something in the hallway.

I looked down and saw that my foot had really torn open Marky’s backpack that had been resting by his door for so long. There was a rotten sandwich bag filled with remnants of some sort of sandwich, a bunch of candy bar wrappers, his wallet, and a notebook. The surface materials didn’t seem to faze me though. I was more curious about the brown, leather bounded journal that was peeking out from inside of the backpack. I reach down and pulled on the journal, barely touching it as if it would be scalding hot.

The journal fell from the hole I had accidentally created and landed on the floor, squared up perfectly to my body, inviting me closer. I had seen the other notebook plenty of times before, but this brown journal, this tattered book, this was new.

I couldn’t resist the temptation. I found a new sense of courage and coping and picked the journal up, gently running my fingers over the front over, stopping at the leather cord that was wrapped around its body several times to keep it shut.

I bit the inside of my cheek as I carried the journal with me into my bedroom, never taking my eyes off of the cover. I rolled the cover over in my hands, and on the back of the journal I saw Marky’s name scraped into the cover, a date right beside it. 2008. How long had Marky kept a journal and what did he keep in it?

Notes

OMG FINALLY AN UPDATE, RIGHT?

I'm SO UNBELIEVEABLY SORRY that it took me almost three months to post a new chapter for this. My life has been complete and utter SHIT to be honest. I'm not even going to sugar coat it. I've been hating life so much because we had to put my ten year old black lab down because of a cancerous tumor in his nose that had grown out of control. I grew up with him, he was like a brother to me. We've had him since I was in fifth grade and now I'm in my third year of college. He was there for half of my life - the half where you're older and can remember the little memories better. He is in every important memory that I have. And now he's gone :(

Anyway, it'll be a month on Sunday that he's been gone. It gets harder and harder every day. I have never lost anyone in my life that was close to me - not a family member or close friend or close friend of the family, not even a pet - until now. I feel like I channeled a lot of that into this chapter. I wrote this story off of zero experience on what it is like to lose someone, and going back, I feel that I was pretty accurate to the feelings I tried to portray. I can still hear my dog walked down the hallway sometimes and I can still feel his warmth next to me when I am trying to fall asleep at night. And I know that my puppy, Goji, who only knew him for a month and a half, feels him in the house, also. It's insane.

Even though Meedie seemed like she was going to get better, I needed her to break down again because that's what it's like. One day you're like, "I am over this. I can move on." And then out of nowhere, you're crying and hurting because you can never move on from it. And so I needed that to happen to Meedie. I needed to try and vent through her character about how you can never really move on.

Anyways, sorry for my long author's note. I just felt the need to explain, I guess. And there's other shit going on in life, but non of it seems as important to the main feelings of grief and depression I am having over the loss of my beloved Raider. Thanks for reading this story and sticking around even though my updates have been non-existent for far too long. I love you all so much. <3