Everything changed the moment it happened. Even when I'm old and everyone else will have forgotten, everything will be different. It will get easier, that's what my mom says, and it already has.  In the days after, well, I didn't believe it for a while. Michael wasn't the only one, four others got shot that day. But everyone else came home. 
The worst part was that he was only 14. I still remember what he looked like when he was born. I remember sitting in the waiting room with my father. The room was cold and I was only three. But my dad looked more terrified then I had ever see him so I comforted myself, and when we met him my dad was shaking so I held him. I remember how he cried on his first day of kindergarten and clung on to my mom's leg until I told him the teacher was nice and he would be all right. I remember the movies we made when we were younger. I've tried to re watch them but I'm not ready yet. 
About a year after Michael died there was a shooting at an elementary school. Kids died, five, six year olds.  It brought my grief tumbling back in full force but there also a thousand other emotions. Anger that the reporters were forcing the families to talk about it over and over.  Resentment, why do they find these children's deaths important and not my brothers. And sorrow for Michael, and for these children.  For my family, and for their's.  But there was also a strange feeling. A feeling even I didn't expect. Hope. Hope because so many people were donating huge amounts of money to support the survivors. Hope because the world was rallying around these people.  Hope, because finally it seems that the world was determined to stop this. 
The hope had dispersed a few months later.  Some things brought a glimmer of it back. The reports of anti-violence programs in schools or the kid who was contemplating mass murder and turned it around to become a police officer.  But then I would read about three new domestic violence cases and how that same kid later killed himself and two others.  Or how a terrorist group in the Middle East was kidnapping girls and raiding cities. And it all flew away again, faster than before.
It wasn't just that hope that I lost, I began to lose hope for everything. And the yawning hole that the hope left started to get filled with something else. A black gas, that solidified itself in my gut. At first it would creep into my stomach when I was reading the news or late at night thinking about some killing or another.  Then even a day spent inside watching movies or a racist joke was enough to bring it in multitudes. Soon just the act of living brought it on. I started to think it was a blessing to Michael that he got taken out of this world. And just the action of thinking that brought on billows of the stuff.  The second anniversary of his death came and I lay on my bed feeling the vapor creep its way up my throat. I traced the cracks with my eyes until it reached my head. I could feel it diffuse through my brain but I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything. It reached into the depths of my subconscious and pulled out the thought that had been forming for months. What if I could just die, what if I killed myself?  As soon as I thought it the gas seemed satisfied, retreated.  Even though there was no one around the universe seemed to fall silent for a moment.  I repeated it in my head a few times, rolled it on my tongue, rose from the bed.  As I got up I exhaled the breath I didn't realize I had been holding and collapsed in tears on the bed. 
I'm not going to write about the things in my head that night because that would be like writing down the contents of my soul, but I think the gas found its way into my tears. Because I woke up in the morning, and I smiled. And I walked outside, and I smiled. And I cried the next day, and the day after that, but I laughed too. And I still cry sometimes, but I'm still laughing too.