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Much of my life, I didn’t get a choice.

I don’t think you knew my story because you were my little brother in all ways save genetics. Mine to shield and take care of. You didn’t need to carry the weight of knowing that a father or a mother would do those things to a daughter. Perhaps, I should have treated you as my peer. Perhaps if I did, there would have been a tiny chance you would have told me when you hurt because you knew I hurt too.

I am not naïve. Age graced me the wisdom that I could not have saved you – you’re the only one who could save you.

But…

If I could travel back to the moment before the point of no return, I’d fucking try with everything I’m made of…

In that critical moment, I take away whatever tool is in your grasp and replace it with my hand. I slap your cheeks and make you look in my eyes. I am here. You will not do this.

I drag your boneless will to live out into the sunlight inch by inch and drench you in cold water. I demand a 72-hour hold during which I assemble everyone you’ve ever touched. Every person who’s experienced your charming laugh and brilliant smile. Countless people come. You don’t even know most of them, but they know a tiny bit of you through us. You are just as much a piece of us as we are a piece of you. People keep coming. You can’t see how many people are here in the bowels of this cave of darkness that is your own lonely despair. But slowly, you begin to sense and soon hear the deafening volume of heartbeats surrounding you. You are not alone.

But more crucially as you stand on that precipice of us speaking of you in the present versus past tense, I hold your heart gently to protect it from darkness trying to take you. I punch and kick and swing at it until you open your eyes to see the light.

I make you tell me why you are hurting. Why this is the only way you can fathom to get out of the dark. Even if you don’t tell me, even if you are a heap of a man blinded by sadness unable to walk, we all link arms and carry you through the miles of darkness one heartbeat at a time.

Because I will not let you take yourself from you. From me. From us. From the world.

Because I would not choose a world without you, Sammy.