Cancer.

 I wish I could say this all started with Cancer. 

That doesn't sound right, does it? 

There's going to be a lot of things that I say in this post that are not going to sound right. 

It's not about being right.

Here's your trigger warning. 

I talk a lot of shit in this post.

 My 'brother' (by blood only) and his stupid, selfish, spoiled wife had trained him to forget about me. I was less than according to their behavior. I have always been treated as less than by these two dum dum lollis. 

The real reason why she doesn't come down to visit isn't because her neck hurts or because she can't handle the long two hour drive. 

It's because of me.  

It's because I don't like to eat shit out of a stinky boot. 

I will do it.... but only for people that deserve it.... and only for so long. 

My brother and his wife told me a long time ago, 'I'm an alcoholic asshole and that's all I'll ever be.' 

So that's what I became....for them. 

I remember the one time they stayed at the old house of horrors. 

She had to bring her big ugly, stinky, pure bread dogs with her. 

She also had to stay in Bobby's room. 

Bobby got booted to the attic that had no heat at the time. 

I questioned it. 

I questioned every boundary they would drive all the way from Erie to cross. 

The first time she walked into our house she decided my kitchen needed cleaning. Maybe it did. Maybe it did. 

I was taught not to touch another woman's kitchen. It was a major boundary cross. It was etiquette. 

All I pictured in my head was my dead mother throwing 'f-bombs' in the gossip conversation that would ensue from something like that. I missed her. My dead mother. I missed her everyday, especially back then. The spoiled nobody standing in my kitchen wouldn't know anything about loss. She wouldn't know anything about me. 

The last time I remember her and the stinky dogs coming to my old house and staying in Bobby's room. I had come home about 2am. My brother woke up to go to the bathroom, she hadn't trained him like she had her other dogs yet. 

I was good at getting him wound up, he would try to intimidate me by screaming and yelling and name calling. I dealt with that everyday from Bobby. 

I got good at acting like I just didn't care. 

She would slink out behind him like a snake. She pretended to use the bathroom all the while listening to the big, strong man tell me about myself. 

The next time I see them in the wee small hours of the morning, she's sitting in the spinning chair in the tiny office next to Bobby's room. 

Big, strong, trainable husband is taking a crowbar to Bobby's bedroom door. 

'What happened?' I poked. 

'We locked ourselves out the room.' He replied in his usual irritated and miserable tone. 

 'And you two are engineers???', I asked incredulously and burst into laughter. 

My brother (by blood only) turned and stepped to me. As if that were going to be intimidating. His wife sat in the spinny chair and watched. 

I didn't flinch. 

The ridiculousness of two snot-nosed, over educated, engineers not knowing how to properly use a bedroom door gave this alcoholic asshole a major case of the giggles. To top it off they had to use a crowbar to get back in, they couldn't think of any other alternative, but a crowbar. 

Their stupid, stinky, ugly, pure bread dogs were still in the bedroom, howling away in their too small crates. 

After my brother pried the wood from the frame of Bobby's bedroom in our one-hundred year old house everybody *but me* went back to bed.

I had a 'snapshot' memory from that moment. A crowbar. You used a crowbar. And I'm the alcoholic asshole. That phrase spun around in my head for twenty years. 

I'd tried to talk to this arrogant, spoiled, spineless, sorry excuse for a brother several times. 

FOR YEARS. 

I called him when Bobby was sick. He didn't answer. 

I called him after my boyfriend committed suicide, he had to work. 

I called him while I was in the psych ward. He encouraged me to take my medicine, any medicine, all the medicine.

I called him again when I was in the psych ward. I asked him to have a therapy session with me. 

I called him again when I was in the psych ward, I tried telling him the way he treated me over the years had done damage. To me. To us. 

'Sticks and stones....', he sighed through the phone and didn't even finish the old, dried up, cliche saying. 

You're bullshit wouldn't work in therapy. I thought to myself. 

Then he used the old:

'I gotta go I'm at work.'

I gently hung up the phone. That would be the last time I'd ever talk to him. He was such a spineless piece of shit. He always acted as if he had a job that was so important. As far as I knew he was sending emails about college bowl pools and funny cat memes. He was calling Bobby to talk about baseball and his wife's parents. 

He thought if he made a lot of money it would make him better than a certain class of people. He thought if he made money his life would be better. 

'Sticks and stones....' I thought. 

Oh, it sticks alright. 

His words stick right in my brain next to the definition for 'professional passive-aggressive spineless, dickless, asshole'. 

The stones would come from my end. 

So tell me.... do words hurt?

Is the tongue not mightier than the sword? 

'What is wrong with your brother?' my friends would ask me. 

'I don't know. I think his balls are sitting on a shelf somewhere in his wife's craft room.' I would reply. 

I picture them using a crowbar throughout their house to get into every door. 

We never did have that piece of wood on Bobby's bedroom door replaced. 

Sticks and stones brother. Sticks and stones.