My Brother Was a Writer, Too

About five or six years BKD, I went back home for Christmas vacation and met up with Suzie, a childhood friend I hadn't seen in years. It was one of those chilly Los Angeles nights that I always forget about when I'm coming home - it will always be weird that the desert gets cold - and we turned on the heat in my mother's car. We picked up some of her friends, drove to the top of a Highland Park hill, and climbed over a guard rail to a graffitied cement wall. The street was quiet and they all poured out off the car to circle the wall, sleek and hungry in hoodies and Converse, rattling cans of spray paint at their hips. I stood off to the side and talked with a young guy who seemed to find my adorable purse and heeled boots funny.
"I've been a writer for years," he said.
"You write? Me too."
"What do you write?"
"Fiction. Short stories, mostly."
"Uh, no." He smirked and pointed at the wall. "I meant graf."
That's when I realized that, despite my best intentions, I wasn't cool. And that my definition of "writer" was rather narrow.

Recently, Ky became a "writer" in his own right. I just found that out. There's a lot I don't know about my brother.

After he died, my mother sent me a link to a graffiti site that his friends post to. It has some of Ky's writing and then a bunch of RIP stuff his friends have done. Check it out.