Separate paths, and shortcuts.

Those who know me personally know that my big brother is the main reason my life has had an abundance of turbulence.
In my life, I've met many people who look at my family from the outside and think they know who we are, or what our lives are like. They think we're this perfect little family. That I'm spoiled because my parents support me as much as they do. That I haven't had a single hard day in my life.
They're wrong.

When my brother and I were young, we were the highlight of each others' lives. He's the reason everyone in my family calls me Risa - he was two when I was born, and couldn't pronounce my whole name. He stuck to my side like glue, protecting me, and babying me, and making sure no harm ever came to me. I was his little treasure, and we were quite the partners as kids; we were thick as thieves, even before I could walk.




Those who know my brother now would be amazed to know what he was like when we were younger. He wore glasses, used to skateboard; he wore JNCO Jeans and hung with all sorts of kids his age. He played baseball, soccer, basketball. Listened to the likes of Matchbox 20 and Chumbawumba. He was always the one who had the cavities when we went to the dentist. He used to smile. He used to do this impression of a mouse that would make our mom laugh in the funniest way. When we shared a room, I was little and my bed was too high, and I'd whine for him to help me up or for him to retrieve my GloWorm, and he did, every time. We used to fight over who got the last sip out of the soda can, and over who took a bath first (whoever took at bath first had to go to bed first, and neither of us wanted to go to bed first). He used to make my Barbies fight, and I'd yell at him. We used to put my cat Callie in the pink Little Tikes stroller my mom had when she was a home day care provider, and we'd put the plastic play helmet we had on her and race her around the play room, pretending she was a racecar driver (she never seemed to mind). We stayed out late one Halloween in the Big Climber with friends from down the street, telling scary stories. He swam in the ditch near our house the year it rained so much, it filled the ditch almost to the top (he wouldn't let me, even though I begged him). He and his friends (and I) beat up the 6th grader who was messing with me when I was in the 4th grade. He developed the nickname 'Geecha' for me, for some reason, and I absolutely hated it, so I started calling him 'Justina'. He was grounded practically every weekend, while I got grounded, but never as often. He was the talker, and I was quiet one. We teased each other, and we fought, just as any set of siblings would.
But at the end of the day, we were always brother and sister.




Justin and I were more alike than different, when we were young. The two years between us made us closer than some other siblings we knew, and to be honest, I loved that closeness. Of course, Justin went through the phase where being friends with your younger sibling cramps your style, and I went through the phase of becoming extra-clingy just to annoy him.
We moved home to Texas around September of 1998, and for at least a good two years, he was the same kid he'd been back on good ol' Holloman Air Force Base, back in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
But then, he got caught up in...I guess expectations? He dropped his skateboard and baseball and soccer for basketball with the black kids. It was like all of a sudden, that was his crowd - he had to belong to the people who, in the eyes of some of our race, we were 'supposed' to be. He seemed desperate to fit in somewhere, and while I felt the same, I knew I couldn't fit into one specific crowd.
I was a wanderer. Justin was meant to be the same, but he never quite understood that.
His 8th grade picture is the last school one you'll ever catch him smiling in, and even that one wasn't as grand as the ones he had as a kid.




Brother (which is usually what I call him, nowadays) and I began going down different paths. His was rougher than mine. We both fought to fit in, but I was more successful at it than he was.
I can pinpoint the moment where life changed for both of us, though.
December 20, 2001.
Our grandfather - "Pappy", as we called him - passed that day. He was our hero. We loved him more than I think words can even express. And after such a short part of our lives, he was gone, and neither of us knew how to handle it.
I turned to shutting myself off from the world. Justin just acted like it didn't happen.
While I would turn to my mother and we'd break down together, Justin didn't talk about it. It was like it was a taboo for him. He never spoke about how angry or how hurt he was by it; we just never spoke about Pappy's death. We just didn't.
I think that was a terrible mistake, on his part as well as mine and my parents.

While I went through some of the most depressing years of my life, Justin did as well. He made "friends" who turned out to be worthless and conniving. By the time high school ended for him, I was a sophomore, and he was miserable. He left school with next to no friends, because he'd done the right thing and walked away from a fight, and was pummeled for it because it made him 'weak' and a 'bitch'.
Had he fought that day, he'd have been in trouble. He'd been warned to not get involved in anymore fights. So, he didn't. A friend was getting beat up, and he stepped in and tried to stop it. When the bully threatened to fight my brother, he walked away from it.
That boy and his friends, in turn, ganged up on my brother another day and beat him up. For being the bigger person and walking away from a fight. How damn ridiculous is that?!
That day, I was so angry I could spit fire. There I was, 15, and my blood was boiling so hot that I'm pretty sure I could've taken those seniors who messed with my brother. He laughed at me and tried to calm me down, but I was livid.
It didn't matter that he was older. It didn't matter that he handled that situation so maturely. Someone had hurt my brother, and I wasn't okay with it. And I wanted to protect him, just as he'd done me in the past.

Justin graduated in May 2004, and the path from there has been a hilly one.

He moved in and out of our house several times while I was still in high school. He'd drift for a few weeks, eventually coming home again. I wouldn't see him, but he'd call me just to let me know he was still okay. It was always a fight between him and our parents (our dad, mostly) that would send him away, but the love he and I shared always kept him tied to me, so he'd call so I would know not to worry so much.
I still worried anyway.
There was one time that he was gone for about two weeks, and I never heard a word. He didn't call me once. I feared he was dead. That was always (and still is) my biggest fear, him winding up dead on the streets somewhere.
So when he showed up on the doorstep two weeks after he left, I screamed at him. And he broke down crying, and apologized, and we had a long talk that day, and he told me that I was the one person in his life that he hated to see hurting because of the things he did. And then I cried even more.

He's not perfect, my brother, but when he loves, he loves hard.

Over the past three years or so, there have been many developments in my brother's life that have brought us to where we are now. A girlfriend who on most occasions I do not trust or cannot stand, and her family, who has caused us more grief and trouble than anyone needs or deserves. Two nieces that I adore; one born November 6, 2006, the other November 13, 2007. He's made plenty of mistakes that could very well end him up in jail. I worry about him more than I worry about anything else.
There's always the chance that one day, I'll wake up, and he'll be gone.

Do you know what it feels like to see a cop car and have your heart stop? I do.
Have you received a call at 1:30 in the morning that turns your whole world upside down? I have.
Have you had to stare at your own flesh and blood as he sits in the backseat of a patrol car, mouthing through the glass that he loves you, and you struggle to understand how your life has gotten to that point?
I have.
Justin has said he wants to change more times than I can count. I always want to believe him, but a part of me fears that he'll never learn.
I don't think I'd worry nearly as much if it weren't for those two little girls, the ones he loves more than life, the ones that came sooner than we expected, but we now can't live without.
Every day, I prepare myself for something else to happen. I prepare myself for his girlfriend to act a fool for the 769th time since she came into our lives. I prepare for another call like that one I answered last summer. I prepare my heart to break when I look at him, and I prepare to see the hurt in my mother's eyes when he's let her down again.
I prepare to see him look at me, knowing that I'm not proud, knowing that he's made another mistake.

Every day is a preparation of some sort.

Those who've thought they know my family? They don't know this. They haven't been on that bathroom floor with my crying mother as she tells you she found a gun in your brother's room. They haven't seen the fights my father and Justin used to have. They haven't fallen asleep next to me as I cried myself to sleep more nights than I can count, because I was emotionally drained. Because I felt sick, and angry, and depressed.
It was bad enough that I contributed enough to my depression, but life at home wasn't helping much in the matter, and I was broken.

It's been a long road back from there.

Talking to someone, a professional, has helped. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Life with my brother is still an uphill battle. I have a feeling that it always will be.
I can't change his past, and I can't pick up the pieces for him. He'll have to fix his life on his own, and he'll have to want it in order for that to happen.
Does he want it? I don't know.

What I do know is that no matter what, I love him.
No matter how many times I have been hurt by him, or felt disappointed in him, or just been flat-out angry with him, I love him so much it hurts sometimes.
Because he's my brother.

And no matter what road he travels down, though it will be separate from mine, there will always be a shortcut back into each others' arms, and lives.
And that will never, ever change.

Every story begins somewhere.

Hello, hello world.
Or whoever happens to come across this.

I guess I should begin by introducing myself. I'm Marisa, I'm twenty, and I love to write. If this were one of those group meetings where you sit in a circle with strangers and introduce yourself, that is most likely what I would say.
The one thing you have to understand about me, if you get nothing else, is that I'm a writer, through and through. I found my refuge in it when I was thirteen years old. My grandfather - my hero - passed, and I didn't handle his death very well - or at all, really. I spent the following six years of my life battling a (silent) battle against depression - and I carried with me an anger for the God I've always loved, but felt wronged by during that time. It took until the summer of 2008 before I decided to find help, and since then, my days have grown to be so much easier.
Throughout those six years, I spilled my soul best by writing. In notebooks, on napkins...I have more print-outs from Microsoft Word than I can even begin to count. The words I couldn't say, I wrote. When I would have days where I'd wake up and just hurt, but I couldn't explain why, I would sit at my laptop and write it out. Even if all I was writing is 'I don't know why I feel this way', it felt better to have written something than to have done nothing at all. When my hard days came, I shut myself off from the world completely, and the only way I could speak was through my writing.
Though those dark days have slowly begun to fall behind me, my love for writing has prevailed, and shone through. I can't go a day without it. I started off as an avid poetry writer, which led into songwriting, and now, fanfiction. Yes. I am a fanfiction author, of the Jonas Brothers variety. You can judge me for that all you want, but understand that it doesn't faze me. Writing is my one refuge when I can find nowhere else to go, and through JBFA, I've found some incredible friends and a sense of belonging, where I get to share the things that come from my mind - my ideas, and little parts of me.
It's a wonderful feeling.
Sometimes every day is still a struggle for me. Though I don't get as low as I used to, there are days where I still shut off. It doesn't help that my family situation is sometimes tough - mostly due to the mistakes my brother has made. However, I try my best to keep my head up, because I know what it feels like to be down, and I try to keep my faith in tact and smile as often as I can, because I've learned that the hard times and the drama and the pain come when you least expect them to. I try not to take a single moment for granted.

As for my faith in God? It's slowly being restored.
I stumbled around for those six years, trying to rebuild my faith. Though I believed in Him still, I was angry for a while. To be honest, I was being selfish. All I could think about was how God had taken away a man I loved so much after I'd had a mere thirteen years with him. I wasn't ready to let him go. Plus, I hadn't gotten to say goodbye. And I was pissed. But after a while, the anger subsided, and all I felt was guilt. I wondered if God was then angry with me, after having loved me all my life, and I had treated Him like He was my mortal enemy. I felt ashamed. And I wondered if He was ashamed of me as well.
Then, I found Crosstalk.
My suitemate, who is now my roommate, asked me to come one Wednesday. And so, I did. And at first, I felt out of place because I didn't know anyone or the songs they sang, and I felt uncomfortable. But that night, Grayson, one of the pastors, said a prayer, and in it he asked for all who felt lost, or insecure, or had the tendency to beat themselves down to just look up and be acknowledged. I did, and I looked around, and I saw that I wasn't alone. And suddenly, I felt like I had found a place of support.
And I had.
I joined a heart group made up of some of the sweetest girls I've ever met. I go to Crosstalk almost every Wednesday when I'm at my university (there are some days where I can't, of course), and we have our heart group afterwards. Slowly, I've been finding strong faith again. It's just a group of students and alumni, getting together to celebrate and worship, and the faith that fills the room each week is awe-inspiring to me.
Don't read this and think you know what kind of Christian I am. Even I am not sure. I don't read my bible every day, or even often at all. I don't spout verses from memory. To be honest, I may never be like that. Do I think it's wrong? No. I'm not one to preach and tell people how they should believe, or that they should give themselves to God, because everyone has their own life to lead. I've found strength in faith, but I'm still learning. Everyone finds their strength in different places. I've found mine through my family, through my writing, and through God.


All in all, I think like everyone, I have a story of my own, and it's not exactly black-and-white. Every person has a story; one made of many facets, some jagged-edged, some smooth. And each individual finds a different way to share that story.
Mine is through writing, as you'll find out through here.

So stick around. There are many more chapters of my life to come.