Leave and Cleave

My younger brother came to visit today.  I studied him, looking for the quiet little boy I once knew. Or thought I knew.  In the seriousness of his observations of his workday, I looked for the playfulness we had in our adventures, pretending the headlights shining into our patch of woods were life-threatening ray guns.  Even when I would come home from college, we would run around playing spies, clinging to our youthful games that connected us.

Now he’s a father and a boss with an image to uphold.  His eyes judge me.  Perhaps he thinks I judge him.  I don’t.  I only miss him.  He sits across from me and he is still 600 miles away.  He cut the connecting ties with us, his best childhood friends and implemented them on his kids as their father.  He is building memories and bonds with his offspring, trying to recreate the warm feelings of being so close to someone that there is no embarrassment as we made up impossible scenarios and built impregnable forts.  Ties to those for whom you are responsible never replace the ties created amongst equals.

Was it difficult or painful to cut through the flesh and bone that bound us together?  Do the amputated limbs have ghostly emotions that run across your face as you watch your children playing?  What about the other end of that bond, the one on my side?  Will it ever heal or find peace in the emptiness?

Perhaps he doesn’t judge me, perhaps he merely guards the tender ends of his amputation, afraid we might notice that it is gone.  Playacting closeness instead of make-believe games. 

Since when does one have to despise the old in order to embrace the new?  To throw away what one has judged to be faulty even though it is what has gone into bringing one to this point in life?

Does he stand from his Babylonian tower to survey those he has left behind?  Or is it just the slammed door in my face that I feel?  I don’t know.  The sounds are distant and faint, the impressions so light, that I’m not sure if they are real or imagined.  But I do know the vacuum I feel when he walks into the room.  My insides being sucked right out of me and splattered on the walls of the dining room as we sit and exchange pleasantries just as if nothing is out of the ordinary.

I once thought to entrust my own precious possession to him, but I can’t do that with a stranger who I don’t know and who hides from me.  God forbid.  The stumps of our connections even now lay sore and bleeding between us.  What lies justified this carnage?  Ahhh, separation.  I know of only one force that delights in this dynamic and he has won this round, but he will not win the war.

-  Jeanjaz