Something Wrong

There’s something wrong in the world. No, not the thunderstorm going on outside, or the fact that I can’t sleep for the fifth night in a row and now the kids are up, so I may not get back to sleep until much later. No, this type of wrongness is geared in the direction of “something stinks” and I’ve gotten a deep whiff of it.

It all started when I checked my little brother’s Myspace page. It’s deleted. I don’t know when this happened, but it shouldn’t have happened. I got the “invalid friend ID” message. So someone logged in and deleted the page. I say “someone” because my little brother, David, supposedly died in December 2006, just after Christmas. I never attended his funeral. He died in England, and I live in the US. It was pretty devastating to me because he’d spent that Christmas with us. He was 23 years old.

There’s always something wrong in the world when the dead get up and delete their Myspace pages nearly three years after their demise. Something is awfully wrong.

Of course there’s always that chance that David didn’t die at all. That for the last three years he’s been locked up in a mental hospital (again) and faked his own death prior to being admitted. In 2004, I caught David in one hell of a lie online. He introduced me to his “friend”, Stephanie, who commented on my blog frequently. David had a dial up and dialed into two different numbers to have different IPs: One for him and one for “Stephanie”. Stephanie kept me up to date when David was “hit by a car” and she encouraged me to send him money. The problem? There was no Stephanie. David was Stephanie. David wasn’t hurt or in the hospital. He was fine and communicating with his own sister via the internet, asking her for money under the pretenses that he was dying of internal injuries in the hospital. Five years later, that still brings tears to my eyes. David was 20 when he did this, but he still knew better. I knew better than to lie to family to get money out of them. I don’t even know why he did it. He was working at the time. Eventually, I forgave David and allowed him to be close to me again. But I never forgot what he did.

A picture circulated my little circle of friends in January 2007. I was supposedly taken by Nick, David’s friend, whom, after the Stephanie drama, I have doubts even exists. I’ve never met Nick, and Nick has the same ISP as David, which makes me wonder if David just dialed into another account. Virgin.net is free or pay-as-you-go in England, so it’s entirely possible that he has a second account that he only uses in an emergency setting. Like when he needs an alternate IP. Back to the picture. It was supposedly taken by Nick, of David, dead in his apartment. He’d hung himself. The picture didn’t seem that realistic, but it upset me all the same.

The idea that my little brother lies about the worst possible things in the world and continues to lie well into his twenties, really bothers me. He never used to do this. He was never like this when we were kids.

I’m wondering if he might have faked his death before going to a mental hospital or if he really attempted suicide and was involuntarily put away for nearly three years. Whatever happened, if he’s alive, I wish he’d talk to me.

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