For my brother

In my dreams, I see my brother.

He is fluid, moving from place to place, his face flickering from young to old, his voice both distant and near.  I am searching for him, trying desperately to reach him in time, before he fades away again.

He asks me things, advice, questions about our past and his future.  I want to know when I can see him again.  He says he does not know.  I ask why he isn't closer to me, and he says he didn't choose this path.

I can hear him laughing, see his face as it was when we were children.  His eyes were always so serious for a boy so young, dark, seeing all.  He was vulnerable.  When he smiled, it made you smile, it made you forget those serious eyes.  He was quiet, but his laugh was golden.  I want to go back and apologize for being the bullying older sister that I was.  I want to do it over again, try to right our wrongs.  I want to find the places where he was hurt and fix them, so that his eyes will be less serious and his laugh more frequent.

I have known him for his whole life, but he is still a mystery to me.  His ways are different, his thoughts of a different hue than mine.  He is funny and sly in ways I am not, and his ambitions, his habits, are foreign to me.  It has always baffled me, this difference in essence.  Since I was old enough to look at him and see a person, not a pesky little brother, I have wanted to reach him.  I want to see things as he does, for we are so different.

I wonder if he still admires me.  Growing up, my parents told me time and again that he only wanted to be like me, and I didn't understand.  When we were older, I often seemed to have more influence over him than they did, but I still couldn't reach him, for all that I tried.  I tried to find his hurt and heal it, and found that I could not.  I'm still trying.

In my dreams, I see my brother, but even though I am his older sister, he always seems older than me.  And despite the fact that I am searching for him because he needs me, I know that in truth, I am searching because I need him.

We Fell

If I go back and retrace where my hand has led me, over smooth pages touched with blue and black and this blog, started when I was young and filled with a fire I couldn't name, I find new things each time.  There are truisms I hit upon years ago that only resonate now, past experiences nearly forgotten that lay in wait for me to stumble upon and shake my head at as I go back, back to all the times and places I've lived in.

You still remember all the places you used to go, from the window seat in my first remembered home where I used to watch for my dad, to the crooks of the apple trees I used to sit in and read on hot summer days, to the den at my nana's house where I have sat and listened since I was small.  I remember so many moments in the woods of my youth, on the soccer fields, in the cul-de-sacs.  And I wonder now, as I try to put it all back together--what does it mean, if anything?  How has who I am today changed who I was then?

The past is not concrete.  It shimmers, it changes as you do.  If you don't believe me, think to a before and after.  For me, it is easy: there is a before the divorce and and after; there is a before Preston and an after.  Think of an old lover: there is a before and an after.  But if you try--if you sit and think and try--you will find that the before cannot be the same once the after is upon you.  I remember those afternoons in Bellevue and Preston and know that my parents were happier, but I cannot recall a moment where it is visible.  There are a few golden moments, perhaps, all written down and polished a thousand times over, but surely there were more? surely I knew then that they were happy?

Who you were builds who you are, but who you are changes who you were.  You gain perspectives, you earn windows into your past where you can reevaluate and pass judgment.  But you should be wary: the past will fight back, truth will attempt to surface, and then--

Then it is up to you who you listen to: who you were, or who you are.