About fourteen months ago, my older brother was diagnosed with behavior variant fronto temperal dementia. My brother who is five years older than and is only in his mid-fifties has between 3 and 5 more years of life.

I’m not allowed to talk about it in public because my mother is hiding what is happening because she doesn’t want her sisters to find out. She’s worried that they’ll start, oh, I don’t know. Pity her? Use my brother’s illness as a weapon? I’m not even certain.

All I know is that my brother’s brain is cannibalizing itself. That’s not the right term, but it feels right to say this or to describe it that way. My brother, who was my greatest nemesis and biggest source of pride, my role model whom I aspired to be and wanted never to resemble is going to die. And he’s going to die hating me.

I can hear my nephew now. “It’s not about you Conrad.”

I know. I get it. My brother is going to die and I should be pouring myself into his family. But I’m also writing this here under a pseudonym and on an incognito account. I’m tucking myself into the peripheries of life and sliding this secret into the walls of my many, many confessions. This is where I will breathe.

This is where I will write the truths I am not allowed to speak. Because, at least here, I will be able to breathe. Speak. Scream. Announce all the things that I can’t because someone somewhere has deemed this unspeakable.

My voice is sticky. Like the duct tape covering my mouth.

My brother’s dementia has reduced him to a sniveling, angry man who says evil, horrible things. He talks about loving his video games in which he massacres people by the thousands. He talks about flooding rainfall and bodies floating down the river in the valley below his house. He narrates climbing rock walls and seeing people falling to their deaths, their heads exploding like rotten fruit upon impact.

None of this is real. His reality is perverted and torn down and decimated. It doesn’t exist except in the cracked carnival mirrors in his mind. He speaks his truths and judges those around him. He describes the women at his gym as “meatballs,” inflating (no pun intended) their appearances from slightly overweight to being 600. 700. 800 pounds. If I don’t react, another hundred pounds is added to their bodies. In his mind, they slovenly waddle around the gym, lifting one pound weights in their Zumba classes, packed in so close to one another like rotund animals. He sneers at their light sweats and their heavy breathings as they waddle up the stairs, their legs too fat for their knees to bend.

I know it’s not about me. But I know he’s hitting on the fact that I’m overweight. Have always been overweight. Except when I was bulimic. I know that he has always looked down on any person who carries extra weight, sees them as mentally deficient, a sub-standard specimen of humanity.

It’s like his dementia has finally removed all the masks, the facades, the hidden layers of nice-ities so I know what my value is. Hence why he once called me and asked me “Is there any merit to what you do?”

No.

No there isn’t.

My brother, pre dementia, was perfect. Good looking. Intelligent. Consistent and constant award winner. Frugal but giving. Compassionate to others. Slender. Adventurous.

I am a sloth in comparison. A great big, overweight, stupid sloth.

Funny. Those were my truths until I wrote them. And now. I see their perversity. How ridiculous it is to judge myself by the standards of a man whose brain is decaying.

And yet, those were the standards by which he judged me pre-dementia. And I see how ridiculous it was to try and reach the top of his measuring stick when I really wonder if he could have reached it himself.

My brother wasn’t always a horrible person. When we were children, he took me to the creek behind our house. That same creek now exists in my novel, the one that I have dedicated to my brother. I will someday publish that novel. Not certain how. Not certain if it will be self-publishing or professional publishing.

But I will. I want to memorialize my brother. Or, ironically, the memory of who he once way.

Because I miss him