ELEGY

I wanted to be a beautiful writer, but my writing was ugly, and I knew it was that way because Pam would read my writing and tell me, it's ugly, in the track changes of my Word Docx. But sometimes she would tell me that I wrote gorgeous sentences, so I didn’t know if I should trust her, or not. 

Kendall, my older brother, used to tell me to trust no one, but when I asked him why can’t I trust you? He said, We hurt the ones who we love the most because we don’t know how to handle the question of death. We were drunk and hanging out in the backyard at the ancient purple gazebo, two six-packs of Natty Bo’s deep, when he told me that. And I wished I could have that whole conversation with him again, but I couldn’t now because that wasn’t how time worked. 

I used to live in a three-bedroom California Style Ranch bungalow with Kendall, but now I just lived there with Pam and Kendall’s ashes. His ashes were stashed in a blue piggy bank and it sat neatly on the mantle of my fireplace. Sometimes I would stare at the blue piggy bank when I was high off weed and the blue piggy would start to talk to me in Vietnamese. I never learned Vietnamese when I was a kid because my parents never cared if I learned or not, they were just obsessive with me learning English. So, I would get dropped off at Burke Public Library, and I’d sit on the first floor in the graphic novel section and pretend I was reading picture books, when really I was reading Manga and looking at Dragon Ball nude scenes. 

Pam and I were eating Bun Bo Hue with wooden chopsticks and taking rips from a gravity bong crafted from a Coke Zero half-liter bottle. She lit the aluminum piece lodged in the soda cap with a match, and dunked the bottle into a large Tupperware container. Her lips pursed together as she inhaled in the smoke and blew it out the half-open window behind the kitchen table where it’d been raining steadily since the morning time. She had long black hair with purple streaks and big golden earrings. She didn’t wear makeup except for some black eyeshadow and some foundation, she’d rather spend the money towards our rent she told me. She was wearing a green cardigan with Stanley Kubrick’s face on her back, and baggy ripped jeans that Kendall used to wear. She dipped a summer roll into a plastic cup of peanut sauce, nibbling slowly. I sipped the soup with my spoon and a column of steam rose from the bowl, blanketing my face. Liked it when the steam brushed against my cheeks with a sweet spray of heat, reminding me that I was doing okay right now. I looked over my shoulder at the empty living room where there was a gray leather couch looking lonely as ever. 

Before Kendall died from a car accident, he and Pam used to fuck on the gray leather couch in the living room. His ass had left a deep indentation in the cushions, and it reminded me of a crater on the moon. I wondered if Kendall was an astronaut up there in space, floating away on the white wisps of clouds in heaven, exploring a void that looked so deadly, but so beautiful. Sometimes, when Pam’s not home, I would sit in the indentation and read poems on my phone. My favorite poem was Robert Hass’s poem called “A Story About the Body.” It was about a young composer and a Japanese woman set at an artist colony. Someday, I wanted to be an artist but I didn’t know how to take the first step. Pam had spent hours cooking the Bun Bo Hue so I didn’t mind that it burned my throat when I slurped on the noodles. After we had finished eating lunch, I washed the dishes with some dish soap and a crinkled green sponge. The water felt nice and cold as it ran down the length of my hands. Pam took another g-bong hit and passed out on the gray leather couch.

Pam was very beautiful, but she and I had a platonic relationship and besides I had trauma from hearing Kendall and her fucking. His completion noise sounded like canned applause from a studio audience. That was because Kendall and Pam used to watch How I Met Your Mother before he passed away, and he would time his cumming to the canned applause. I only knew this odd detail because I read it in Kendall’s notebook. It was sitting on his desk and I didn’t know if Pam wanted to see his words, so I had grabbed the notebook and began to read it when I missed him. 

And each day I drank Root Beer and ate salt & vinegar potato chips. That was what Kendall used to eat and I guess I wanted to keep up with his tradition. I was getting a little fat, but it felt cathartic, so I kept drinking and eating. Felt like my brother was with me as I drank and ate up emotions like a cliche. 

The air was cold outside and I sat on my front porch steps and waved at the cars passing by in the neighborhood. I blew kisses at the older couple walking a dog. The cops got called on me. When they knocked on the door, I put on a MAGA hat for them and the charges were dropped. I learned that trick from an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I didn’t know I could get charged for blowing kisses at a dog. But now I knew I needed to go to therapy again, and this time make a better effort, because I didn’t want to get sent back to the mental hospital. 

I listened to a Latinx indie rock band on Spotify and vowed to learn Spanish on Duolingo. I wished playing the guitar could save me from my poor decisions. Kendall never played guitar, but he was a great singer, that was how he got Pam to fall in love with him, he said. He sounded like Marvin Gaye mixed with Lil Peep, Pam had said before. 

Maybe I was an ugly writer but my writing could be beautiful. Pam didn’t read my writing anymore because she was dealing with depression, so now she stayed in bed or stared at the wall when it was dark inside of her room. She had a job as a videographer and photographer for a TikTok influencer, and she took these really Avant-garde videos and pictures, but lately she’d been working on a mural for Kendall. I had asked her if I could help her out with the painting, but she told me this was her personal project and left it at that. 

I sent my old friend Jessica a poem about bugs via email and she said it was cute with a wryly smile emoji. I hadn’t talked to Jessica in three years because she’d hurt me in the past but my memory was so terrible that maybe I had ghosted her instead. Pam saw a photo of Jessica on Instagram and said she looked like a munch which was in the positive connotation, so I didn’t glare at her.

I didn’t want to end up dead like Kendall, but I knew everybody would die at one point in their life. And that would be their last point, their ending, a swan song. I wished I could talk to him, I wished I could hug him, and I wished I could drink Root beer and eat salt & vinegar chips with him. 

I was inside of a Best Buy with Pam and we were looking for a new camera for her, and at times like this I didn’t think too much about Kendall. The temperature felt very hot inside and the lights shined way too brightly on the camera aisle. Pam was looking at the lenses, and I tried to think of something witty and cool to say to her, like maybe the new lens would change her perspective on living with her dead boyfriend’s younger brother. She held a Canon camera up to her face and closed her right eye, aiming the lens at me. 

I pretended I got shot, and then realized that wasn’t funny when there had been a mass shooting at the Fair Oaks Shopping Mall only two months ago. I asked her if she was going to buy the Canon camera, and Pam said it was too expensive. I wanted to steal it for her from the Best Buy, but we were living in a surveillance state and besides, I wasn’t not cool enough to steal something. 

Pam and I were watching How I Met Your Mother on my phone at Burke Lake Park in the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday. I was lying in the grass and tracing triangles in the mud and Pam was peeling a tangerine. She ate the slices and made a face saying this one was very sour. I knew that Pam and Kendall used to watch How I Met Your Mother as they fucked, and I felt weird about watching the show with her. She inhaled the air deeply and I mimicked her. 

It was chilly outside and we both wore a bright downy jacket, mine blue, hers red. And I’d rather listen to an indie rock band instead of watching How I Met Your Mother, but Pam was fully invested. She laughed so hard that snot launched from her nose. She wiped her nose on the arm of my jacket in a weird joking manner, and I pushed her lightly, telling her to knock it off. Don’t do that, she said and reached over to hug me. I got hard and forgot that I was a soft boy for a moment. You smell just like him, she said.

When I was at home, sometimes I went into Kendall’s old bedroom and stared at the novels in his bookcase. He was an avid reader before he passed away, always had a book tucked under his arm, usually a Russian or Latin American author, sometimes a Japanese writer, but seldom American. 

One time I opened up one of the novels and a five dollar bill popped out with a blue pill in it. I thought it was a dick-growing pill, but turns out it was Adderall. I didn’t like to do drugs, but when Kendall died lately I’d been getting high with Pam. She usually just smokes, and sometimes she does Ketamine. 

I missed drinking with Kendall, but I shouldn’t have even been doing that with him in the past, because I was only 17. I pulled out a novel from his bookcase and flipped through the pages but nothing fell out. I read the ending because I was being lazy, and then I went to my room and sat at my desk and wrote a few paragraphs about being Asian American in a digital era, but then I remembered I didn’t have anyone to show my writing to anymore. 

I was thinking about going to college, but I didn’t know if I would get accepted. I wanted to tell Pam but lately she’d been crying in the bathroom with the door locked shut. She drank whiskey with her coffee when she woke up, keeping the empty handles in her bedroom closet. She would probably kill me if she knew I’d been going into her room, and I didn’t go often, but I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. I wanted to study English and minor in something useful like advertising, but maybe I should be a STEM major, or study business, something that would make money. 

After I finished my application for college, I wrote a personal essay about living with my dead brother’s gf, and it looked pretty good on the page, but I wasn’t sure I would show it to Pam. She and I talked less these days, but I knew she had a lot on her mind, so I didn’t bug her too much. 

It was Friday which didn’t really mean anything to me, but I was glad to be alive and well. I didn’t feel so dead inside anymore, I felt excited about the future. I’d been talking more to Jessica via Gmail, and I wanted to travel to Brooklyn so I could hang out with her. Turns out, I had lashed out at her a few years ago over the phone and I had screamed at her. I was going through a manic episode but I didn’t know it at the time. I just remembered drinking beer all night and blasting rap music from my Bluetooth speaker, and then cursing out Jessica. 

We had met on the internet through a social media app, I forgot if it was Twitter or Instagram, but we bonded over poetry and arthouse films and indie rock. Jessica was an amazing poet who wrote about body dysmorphia, mental illness, and cancel culture. She looked happy all the time, but she told me it was performative and just a way to get more followers. She was Vietnamese American too but she’d been adopted by a white family when she was 5. She was 2 years older than me and a freshman at NYU. 

I asked her why she decided to talk to me again, and Jessica told me she had struggled with depression and mental illness, and that she understood what I had gone through. So she wanted to stay in my life and see if we could repair our friendship. The problem was, I was starting to get feelings for her. Last night Jessica texted me about wanting to read my writing and that made me very happy and nervous. I’d been looking for a new reader for my writing, but before that I’d only shown my writing to either Kendall or Pam. And now Kendall was gone, and in a way Pam was gone too. 

When Pam and I went grocery shopping at the Giant for the week, I grabbed a loaf of sourdough bread and told Pam that I like someone. She stopped pushing the shopping cart and put her chin in her hand, staring at me like I had something on my face. Focus on school, kiddo, she told me. Get a job and make some money. Liking someone won’t pay for the utility bill. Then she snagged a carton of oat milk from the fridge and dropped it in the cart, pushing forward as she glanced at her phone.

I felt frustrated and resentful towards Pam. I understood that I needed to help out with paying bills and the mortgage for the house, but she felt more like a roommate than the maternal figure that I wanted her to be. After Kendall had passed away, I knew I’d been seeking comfort and support and love from Pam, not realizing that she didn’t have the bandwidth or wherewithal to be a role model for me. It was inconsiderate for me to hold her to such high standards, but I thought she could step up and be my big sister. I didn’t know Pam as well as I thought I did. 

I left her standing in the frozen food aisle and stormed out of the Giant, spitting at the ground as I walked back home. We didn’t speak for three days after that happened. I realized I needed my space and I still hadn’t processed my grief and loss. I made an appointment with a therapist that I found on the internet. 

Pam turned the basement into an art studio. She bought buckets of different kinds of paint, brushes, easels, and canvasses and placed everything in the center room. Her hands were steady as she painted different paintings of singers. She made portraits of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Lennon. 

I watched her paint from a bean bag chair and noticed that all of the portraits looked like Kendall, but I didn’t tell her that. When Pam finished working, she smoked a bowl and drank a fifth of vodka and told me that my poetry was getting better. I asked her how’s read it when I didn’t remember showing it to her. 

She told me she’d been going into my room and reading my poems on my laptop. She knew the password, because the laptop had originally belonged to Kendall. All of my poems were about a young man being resurrected from death and now he spent his time saving drunk drivers from car accidents. He saved every single person from dying. She smiled and her eyes filled up with tears, telling me that Kendall would have loved these poems. She told me she was wrong and sorry for saying that my writing was ugly, that she’d been angry and sad because of what happened to Kendall. 

As Pam told me all of these details, I felt dizzy and high and warm inside and I stood up from the bean bag chair, and then staggered forward and fell face first against the concrete floor. I blacked out. 

It was a Saturday night in October, right before Halloween, and I remembered picking up Kendall at the BP gas station in Pam’s old red Honda CR-V after I’d drank a case of Natty Bo by myself. He got in the passenger side and told me that Pam and him had been fighting because they’d been talking about the future and Pam wasn’t sure if she wanted to have kids or not. But I want to be a dad, Kendall said. I’ve always wanted to have a baby girl, it’s just like what I was meant to do. I listened to him but he was talking so fast and so loud, and I was trying to cross the intersection. Kendall looked at me and said, should I stay with Pam or should I start over?  I was about to reply and I looked back at Kendall when a black SUV barreled straight ahead into the front of the CR-V on the passenger side. The sound of the window breaking apart. The entire CR-V being crushed like an accordion. Kendall’s face bleeding, his arms flailing up and down, and his head whipping back and his body launching backwards into the street where we grew up riding bikes on.  

When I woke up, Pam was standing over me, her small face streaked with tears. She hugged me and told me I’d been passed out for a good two minutes. Thank God, I’d been breathing, she said. I sat on the couch and tried to relax, but my hands were shaking. I realized now that I had been drinking and driving when Kendall and I had gotten into that car accident. That I should be responsible for my brother’s death. Pam and I went upstairs and we drank cold water from the fridge, and then I started to write an elegy for Kendall. I spent an hour or two just writing my thoughts on a piece of paper, and when I was done I asked Pam to read my writing.

by Andy Tran

Andy Tran is a writer from Virginia. He graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a degree in English. Follow him on Twitter: @AndyT187 and IG @dopestorybroo