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A Toast to Nothing (Part 5)
By Thomas Miller
The words came slowly at first, then in a flood. I wrote without stopping, letting the memories spill onto the page—his bitterness, his brilliance, the slow decay of a man who once believed he was destined for greatness but found himself drowning instead.
I wrote about our childhood.
Richard had been the smartest of us, at least in the way that mattered when we were young. He could talk circles around teachers, recite books from memory, debate history and philosophy as if he had lived through it himself. Our parents doted on him, convinced he would be the one to change the world.
Daniel was different—driven, ruthless. He didn’t waste time on theories or ideas. He went out and did things, built something real, something tangible. While Richard lost himself in books and arguments, Daniel carved his place in the world.
And me? I was somewhere in between. A writer, a storyteller. Not as ambitious as Daniel, not as self-destructive as Richard. Just someone who put the pain on paper and hoped it meant something.
I wrote about how Richard changed. How the confidence that once made him so magnetic turned to arrogance, then resentment. How his losses became excuses, how every failure was someone else’s fault. How, when Trump won the presidency, something inside him broke—not just politically, but personally.
Richard always saw himself as part of an elite class, a man destined to lead, to be admired. He believed that the world owed him something, that lesser minds should bow to his intellect. But when the world moved on without him, when people he deemed ‘unworthy’ rose to power, he didn’t just lose faith in politics—he lost faith in himself.
He drank more. Talked less. His anger, once so sharp, dulled into something pathetic.
And when I finally walked away, when I finally told him I couldn’t keep watching him rot, I think he knew it was over.
Maybe that’s when he made the decision.
Maybe that’s when he picked up the rope.
The Forgotten Death
The worst part wasn’t that he died.
It was that no one noticed.
Five weeks.
Five weeks before his body was found, bloated and broken, the room thick with the stink of decay.
No calls from friends. No concerned neighbors. Not a single person wondering where he had gone.
Just silence.
Even in death, he had been alone.
The more I wrote, the more I realized something terrible—Richard had built his own coffin long before he ever climbed into it.
He had burned every bridge. Pushed away every hand that reached for him.
In the end, his death wasn’t a tragedy.
It was just… inevitable.
The Fight Over Nothing
I wrote about the day Daniel and I stood in that funeral home, arguing over what to do with what was left of him.
“You handle it,” Daniel had said, arms crossed, eyes cold. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”
I had flinched. “He was our brother.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Daniel snapped. “Not for a long time.”
“He had no one else.”
“Maybe he should’ve thought about that before he pissed his life away.”
I hated him in that moment. But deep down, I knew he wasn’t wrong.
Richard had done nothing to deserve our pity. He had spent years pushing us away, choosing whiskey over family, delusions over reality. He had chosen this.
And yet, I couldn’t just let him disappear.
“I’ll handle the arrangements,” I had said, exhausted.
Daniel exhaled, shaking his head. “Fine. But don’t come asking me for money.”
That was the last time we spoke about Richard.
And that was the last time I truly believed we were still brothers.
The Unmarked Grave
As I wrote, I kept thinking about that patch of dirt in the cemetery.
No marker. No name.
Just a hole in the ground, filled with a man who once thought himself too important to be forgotten.
But he was forgotten.
Buried cheaply, unceremoniously, like a stray dog picked up from the side of the road.
And as I typed those words, something inside me clenched.
Richard would never know peace.
He had never believed in an afterlife, never put faith in anything beyond the tangible world. In his mind, when the body rotted, that was the end.
And maybe that was true.
Maybe, right now, he was nothing. Just bones, breaking down into the earth, erased by time.
But as I stared at the pages of his story, I realized something.
If I finished this—if I wrote him—then he wasn’t entirely gone.
Some part of him would exist, at least in ink.
A name on a page. A lesson, if nothing else.
A reminder of what happens when you let resentment eat you alive.
I kept writing.
For the first time, I wasn’t writing to grieve.
I wasn’t writing to remember.
I was writing to warn.
Because I had seen what bitterness could do to a man.
And I refused to let it take me, too.