Mage: Awakening
We all called my older brother Billy although he always wanted to be called William. No one really paid his constant request heed.
Not even his best friend who killed him in a car accident. God damned drunk drivers.
Billy was a great guy and as good an older brother as a kid like me could have. He was cool, goth before it became popular, before it stopped being cool. The thing I will always remember about Billy is his jacket and the smell of cloves. My first clove cigarette was one of his. It was the jacket though that was as much a part of Billy as he was of it. It was a battered black leather jacket with chains and was covered with pins that had witty slogans on them.
His favourite pin was one he had designed himself, or at least he had come up with the sloggan. The pin was red and in tiny black flowing script it read "goth girls dig guys who dig graves". I remember a younger me complaining that it was impossible to read and a living him telling me that the very pin had gotten him laid the night before.
Don't think Billy is crass because we had conversations common to the males of the species. Billy was a poet, an artist, and I suppose my unwitting mentor to me growing up. He never got along with mom and dad which always made me sad and he was moody, but when he smiled it was something else. Something genuine and when he was kind, I doubt Ghandi could have been as nice as him.
All of these things, the books he had that I read, the fact that I kept his jacket after he died, and even moved into his room to be closer to him were important to me. What IS important to me now is that I am not hanging from the rafters of my studio, but am sitting on a petrified stump and sitting right across from me smoking a clove is Billy sans jacket.
Not even his best friend who killed him in a car accident. God damned drunk drivers.
Billy was a great guy and as good an older brother as a kid like me could have. He was cool, goth before it became popular, before it stopped being cool. The thing I will always remember about Billy is his jacket and the smell of cloves. My first clove cigarette was one of his. It was the jacket though that was as much a part of Billy as he was of it. It was a battered black leather jacket with chains and was covered with pins that had witty slogans on them.
His favourite pin was one he had designed himself, or at least he had come up with the sloggan. The pin was red and in tiny black flowing script it read "goth girls dig guys who dig graves". I remember a younger me complaining that it was impossible to read and a living him telling me that the very pin had gotten him laid the night before.
Don't think Billy is crass because we had conversations common to the males of the species. Billy was a poet, an artist, and I suppose my unwitting mentor to me growing up. He never got along with mom and dad which always made me sad and he was moody, but when he smiled it was something else. Something genuine and when he was kind, I doubt Ghandi could have been as nice as him.
All of these things, the books he had that I read, the fact that I kept his jacket after he died, and even moved into his room to be closer to him were important to me. What IS important to me now is that I am not hanging from the rafters of my studio, but am sitting on a petrified stump and sitting right across from me smoking a clove is Billy sans jacket.