Drink Something.

I don't know when exactly my therapist stopped asking, "How have you been?" and started asking, "How many Dr Peppers are on your nightstand?" I don't remember the conversation changing, only that somewhere along the way she realized my words had become poor witnesses. Depression has a way of teaching you to lie without ever intending to. Not the kind of lie meant to deceive anyone else, but the quieter kind you tell because translating the truth into language feels impossible. "I'm okay" becomes muscle memory. "I'm just tired." "I've been busy." "It's been a rough week." Each answer is close enough to the truth to keep anyone from asking another question, but never close enough to touch the thing actually swallowing you. Numbers don't do that. Numbers don't soften the edges or leave out the worst parts because they're afraid of making someone uncomfortable. They don't minimize, rationalize, or apologize. They simply exist. The cans tell the truth my mouth no longer knows how to speak.

There are nine.

Nine little aluminum confessions standing shoulder to shoulder on my nightstand like silent witnesses that have seen too much to look away. Their silver tops catch the morning light, reflecting a version of me I barely recognize. I don't know if each one represents a day, an afternoon, or just an hour where the weight of existing became so unbearable that opening a can was the only task I could convince myself to complete. Depression has a cruel way of shrinking your world until survival is measured in impossibly small victories. Not showering. Not eating. Not answering the messages piling up on your phone. Just lifting twelve ounces of liquid to your lips because your body still requires water even when your mind has stopped believing it deserves to stay alive. I became someone who could look at a row of Dr Pepper cans and know more about my own mental state than I could ever communicate with words. They measure how small my life has become.

It's strange, the things depression steals first. People think it begins with joy, as though happiness is the first thing to disappear. They imagine the obvious losses, the laughter that comes less often, the hobbies abandoned in dusty corners, the smile that slowly forgets how to reach your eyes. But those things come later. Long before depression takes your joy, it takes your instincts. It steals your thirst before it steals your hope. One day you realize you've been lying in the same position for hours, fully aware that your mouth is dry enough to taste like old paper, that your head is beginning to pulse behind your eyes, that a glass of water sits only a room away, and somehow the distance between here and the kitchen has become impossible to cross. The hallway stretches into something that feels geographical, not architectural. Your own house becomes too large. Your own body becomes too heavy to carry. You start negotiating with yourself the way exhausted parents bargain with overtired children. In a minute. After this song. After I close my eyes for just a second. But depression is a master negotiator because "later" rarely means later. It usually means not today. Beneath all of it, your body continues sending quiet, desperate little signals that it still wants to live. Your lips crack. Your muscles ache. Your stomach twists itself into knots of hunger and dehydration. It keeps asking for the smallest acts of mercy, while your mind, exhausted by simply existing, answers every request with the same hollow promise: Later.

When I was little, Chris noticed long before anyone else seemed to. I don't know how. Maybe it's because he'd spent enough time wrestling the same darkness to recognize its footprints before anyone else could see them. He never turned it into a conversation. Never sat on the edge of my bed asking me to explain what I was feeling. Never tried to convince me that life was beautiful or that everything would be okay. He understood something most people still don't: when you're drowning, encouragement can feel like another thing you're expected to carry. So he loved me differently. He'd walk into my room, set a cold can of Dr Pepper on my nightstand, smack me on the head just hard enough to annoy me, and walk right back out as though he'd only come in to bother me. It wasn't until I finally asked him why he always did it that he shrugged and said, almost like it was the most obvious thing in the world, "So I know you've at least had something to drink." That was the entire explanation. No speeches. No carefully chosen words. No desperate attempts to rescue me from myself. Just the quiet wisdom of a brother who somehow understood that when depression has reduced your world to the size of your own bed, love doesn't always look like pulling someone back into life. Sometimes it looks like placing life within arm's reach and trusting that, for today, that will be enough.

Then depression took him instead. There is a kind of cruelty for which I still haven't found a language, because every word feels too small to hold it. How do you reconcile being taught to survive by someone who ultimately couldn't survive himself? Where do you place that truth inside your heart without breaking every shelf you've ever built to hold the people you love? My mind returns to it over and over, like a tongue worrying the sharp edge of a broken tooth, unable to stop pressing against the place that hurts. It never reaches a different conclusion. It never finds relief. He spent years quietly handing me reasons to keep my body alive on the days my own mind forgot it mattered, all while carrying a darkness that, in the end, became heavier than even he could bear. There are moments when that realization feels almost unbearable to hold. It makes the world feel backwards, like gravity suddenly chose the wrong direction. The person I trusted to remind me to stay became the person I couldn't convince to stay himself. Every version of that sentence is true, and every version of it feels impossible. I have spent years turning it over in my hands, searching for the side that hurts less. I still haven't found one.

So now I keep a can of Dr Pepper on my nightstand. At least, that's the story I tell people. The truth is, I don't keep a can. I keep however many have accumulated by the time the darkness finally loosens its grip enough for me to notice them. They aren't empty. They're still full from when I first set them there. Tiny red lifeboats waiting patiently beside my bed, each one carrying the same quiet message my brother left me all those years ago: Please drink something. Some days I do. Some days I don't. And when the depression deepens, another can appears beside the first, then another beside that one, until the nightstand begins to look less like furniture and more like physical evidence of a battle no one else can see. I wonder sometimes what another person would think if they walked into my room. They'd probably see clutter. Maybe a strange obsession with the drink. Maybe they’d see a waste of a perfectly good Dr Pepper. I almost wish that was the truth. It would be so much easier than explaining that every unopened can is a conversation between the sister I became and the brother I lost. Every one of them is another day I wasn't sure I could trust myself to remember that my body still deserved kindness. They aren't waiting because I forgot about them. They're waiting because, on the hardest days, even reaching a hand toward hope can feel impossibly far away.

My therapist doesn't see cans of Dr Pepper. She sees a timeline. A graph no insurance company could ever chart, but one we've both learned how to read anyway. She counts them the way meteorologists study the sky before a storm, not because clouds are the disaster, but because they reveal what the atmosphere has been doing long before anyone else feels the rain. The cans don't matter. They are simply evidence. Physical proof that something invisible has once again settled over me and refused to leave. She doesn't know she's counting in my brother's language. There are nine. Nine is not just a number. Nine means I've been disappearing in ways most people will never notice, because I still eventually answer messages. I still work. I still make jokes in the group chat. I still smile when someone makes a joke. But depression is rarely loud at first. It's an erosion. Nine means brushing my teeth has become a negotiation instead of a habit. Nine means I step over laundry because the thought of folding it feels strangely impossible. Nine means the dishes in my sink have quietly become another thing I avoid looking at because acknowledging them would require admitting how long I've been underwater. Nine means my phone stays on Do Not Disturb, not because I don't love the people reaching for me, but because I cannot survive another conversation where I'm asked to translate an ache that has no vocabulary. Nine means I've become a ghost haunting my own life, watching the days pass through the window without ever feeling like I truly arrived inside them. My body keeps showing up. The rest of me is still trying to remember the way home.

This is the part no one sees. The endless conversation that starts when the room gets quiet enough for depression to have the floor. My phone buzzed on the carpet hours ago. I watched the screen light up without ever reaching for it. Let it die, the voice says. People are adaptable. They'll get used to hearing from you less. Better to ease them into your absence now than force it on them all at once. That is the cruelty of depression. It doesn't usually shout. It builds arguments. It gathers evidence. It makes your disappearance sound responsible. Considerate, even. Then it points toward my brother like Exhibit A. See? The worst already happened. They survived that. They'll survive you, too. My phone eventually goes black, and somehow that tiny dark screen feels like a rehearsal. A world continuing without me, asking nothing in return. I keep staring at the same place on the wall until my eyes burn because even closing them feels like another decision I'm too tired to make. The room slowly begins swallowing me whole, and for a while I let it. Then, just inside the edge of my vision, I see it. A can of Dr Pepper. Six inches away. Close enough to touch. Too far away to reach. My throat burns with a thirst my body still has the courage to feel, while my mind whispers that lifting my arm costs more energy than I'm worth. It's astonishing how small depression can make a human life. Eventually, the battle between living and dying is no longer fought in grand gestures. It's fought across six inches of empty space.

Sometimes I find myself wondering what was sitting on his nightstand during those last weeks. Not because I think the answer would change anything, but because grief has a way of convincing you that if you collect enough tiny details, you'll eventually stumble across the one that explains the ending. Before I even knew he died, I read through the messages from his last day. He and his wife were fighting. She was leaving. He kept asking her to come talk to him, to please come home, to not leave things like this. She wouldn't. As the hours passed, something changed. He stopped measuring the day in conversations that never happened and started measuring it in NOS energy drinks. One. Then another. Then another. I don't know why that detail lodged itself inside me, but it never left. Sometimes I catch myself wondering if those cans were his version of my Dr Peppers. They were something tangible to reach for while his mind was becoming a place he couldn't survive alone. I will never know if that's true, and maybe that's what haunts me most. My brain keeps trying to solve a puzzle that has missing pieces by design. Were there more cans than usual? Did anyone notice? Did they mean nothing at all? Or did they mean everything? I don't get to ask him. I don't get to know whether, in the final hours of his life, he was still reaching for one last ordinary thing that might have kept him tethered to tomorrow.

Maybe they weren't. Maybe I'm just a grieving sister trying to build a bridge out of details that were never meant to hold this much weight. But I can't stop wondering. He taught me that sometimes surviving can be as small as reaching for a can someone left within arm's reach. Maybe, somewhere inside his own darkness, he had found something that made the next hour feel possible, too. Or maybe, by the end, even that wasn't enough. I'll never know. That's the sentence grief keeps forcing me to read. I'll never know. That's the unbearable part of suicide. The questions don't fade with time. They multiply. They scatter like broken glass through every memory, and you spend the rest of your life trying not to cut yourself on them.

There are nine cans on my nightstand tonight, and I wish I could tell you I look at them and feel hopeful. I don't. Hope requires being able to imagine something beyond this, and right now I can't. I can't picture better. I can't picture healed. Some nights I can barely picture morning. Depression has filled every available space inside me until there is nowhere left to stand that isn't dark. It feels like being buried alive inside my own body, screaming without making a sound, while the rest of the world continues somewhere above me. People are laughing. Cars are moving. Dinner is being made. Someone is folding laundry. Someone is complaining about Monday. Life keeps performing its ordinary little miracles while I lie here trying to understand how everyone else is breathing so easily when there doesn't seem to be any oxygen left in the room.

This is the part people don't like hearing about. The part where I can't give the darkness a purpose. I can't tell you I'm fighting because I know how beautiful life is. I can't promise that somewhere beneath all of this I secretly believe everything will be okay. Sometimes depression takes even that. Sometimes it strips you down past optimism, past gratitude, past fear, until there is nothing left inside you capable of imagining rescue. There is no light at the end of the tunnel because I can't see far enough ahead to know whether the tunnel even ends. There is only blackness pressed so tightly against my face that even tomorrow feels imaginary.

And somewhere inside all of that darkness, there is a Dr Pepper. That's it. Not a sunrise. Not my future. Not some profound reason I suddenly remember that makes everything worth enduring.

A fucking can of Dr Pepper sitting six inches from my hand. Sometimes that is genuinely as far as I can see. So when my mind starts demanding answers I don't have… Why are you still doing this? How much longer can you keep this up? What exactly are you waiting for? If he couldn't beat it, you definitely can't. No one would notice if you disappeared… I don't answer anymore. I can't. Those questions require a version of me capable of seeing farther than tonight.

Instead, I reach six inches. I wrap my hand around the can. I hear the tab hiss open in the dark. And I drink. Not because I have hope. Not because I believe tomorrow will hurt less. Not because I've suddenly remembered some beautiful reason to stay. I drink because twenty-five or so years ago, when the darkness swallowed everything else, my little brother put a Dr Pepper beside me and reduced survival to one step.

He is dead now. The darkness isn't. And tonight, neither am I. There are nine cans on my nightstand. And somewhere underneath all the darkness, underneath the questions that will never be answered, underneath the unbearable fact that the person who taught me how to survive couldn't survive himself... there is still one instruction I understand:

Drink something.