i had actually seen him prior to this when i was shown where i would be working by some of the biggest assholes i will ever meet. brandon was pretending to clean a table. that was their job. pretend to clean. he muttered something when i walked by and i thought he was an asshole. i didn't care. i was new and i didn't want to be new because being new at a unit in the army is like having a giant fucking beacon on your ass. i was tired of stupid army games and i just wanted to kick back at a duty station. that wasn't going to be the case but that's not what this story is about.
i dont know how it all happened that is how brandon and i became best pals for our short time together. but we did. we'd go to the commissary together (it has food!) and we'd talk shit about deese. like one time, we were at the old motor pool and brandon made it a point to make deese stand at least three feet away. turns out that was near impossible since deese wanted to rape brandon.
i only knew brandon for about three months or so before he left the army and went back to nevada and essentially nailed the coffin for me since i was fucked and alone in a really shitty situation. i probably would never have said it out loud to him back then and it probably would have led to a lot of problems but i desperately wished he would have stayed there a little longer. it just wasn't in the cards.
in our short time, we dabbled with otc pills and the bullshit that came out of that. we got stuck in the middle of seoul and got in massive trouble for it. we fought a lot. we watched a lot of tv. we shopped. we made pudding. we did laundry. i force fed him water. i loved his eyes and freckles.
the night he left for good, we took pills. his room was empty and i think he was still cleaning it. he stayed in my room for a few hours and i passed in and out of sleep while weird ass music played on the stereo he bought me. my black light was on. we decorated my room together.
when i woke up it was one of the saddest loneliest wake ups of my life. he was gone of course and in his place was a pink ball on my lamp. a robot in my microwave. a bag of magnets. a cup with coins. a neatly folded uniform and his boots on top.
the pink ball stayed on my lamp the rest of my time overseas. the robot moved around and when i left korea, i left it with a silly guy that i knew brandon would have gotten along with. the magnets i still have to this day. they are on my fridge (the ones we bought together and the ones that belong to aryanna) i kept the cup throughout the tour, as well. it held random things. it's also where i would toss those useless coins that the army places so much importance over. the coins i gave to a katusa. and i still have your uniform tucked away in some kind of storage.
when brandon left korea we talked off and on for a few weeks. id send a message and he'd reply every once in a while but i didnt want him to incur any crazy phone bills and over time he stopped writing so i figured he'd forgotten his old life in the military and he was probably dying to forget about the horrible place he had left behind. i thought of him from time to time. i'd look him up every once in a while but he didnt have much of an internet footprint. it wasn't until i was almost about to leave korea that i made a final attempt to get in touch again so we could maybe meet again when i returned to california. he had made a facebook! we reconnected and i was happy, though it's never been quite the same- internet/texting vs our face-to-face contact.
brandon was the one who got me to love redbulls. brandon was the one who made me appreciate walking up a thousand steps to get to the stupid office i worked at (he once made a comment to the degree of 'you'll have amazon legs when you leave this place!'. i smirked at that line from time to time while i begrudgingly made my way up the stairs). brandon helped me decorate my shitty barracks room in a way that would get the chain-of-command to think i was a fucking nut. he gave me some cabbage patch kid doll. so i wrapped a scarf around it and hung it from my lamp. i spent an insane amount of money on glow in the dark shit and a blacklight. we cut out "artistic" pages from music magazines and styled them in "artistic" fashions and put them on my wall. it was rather sad to throw them away. we would water color. i would made random art pieces out of candle wax or rolled up magazines and draw weird shit.
brandon basically made my life better just by being in it.
and i miss him like a retard misses the point.
but i'm so glad i know him cus he's fucking brilliant.
i found this picture a few minutes ago and it reminded me of everything. like the burned up 'blood brothers' magazine pages on the wall (they never moved) and putting up all the pictures and of course, the oracle and that ugly doll.
ignore the skeleton in the middle of the room.
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