little_brother ovenbird He appears, my brother, while I’m folding laundry in my parents’ basement. But it isn’t him as he is now, it’s him as a nine year old child with bowl cut hair hanging in front of his eyes. Thick sorrow pours from him like smoke from a bronze censer and I breathe it deep into my lungs. He looks up at me and takes both my hands gently in his. He doesn’t say a word, just squeezes my palms, then he turns and leaves, fading into the darkness of the basement like a vanishing spectre. I’m left gasping, the air in the room replaced with watery grief. The next day I wander around carrying a hole where my childhood used to be. We were young together once and now we’re both in our forties and the house we grew up in belongs to someone else. You’re off traveling in Amsterdam and I’m trying to write in between scrubbing toilets and pretending I know how to be a parent. You’re watching Sol Gabetta play with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra while I’m packing peanut butter sandwiches for school lunches. It’s unpredictable, isn’t it, what life becomes? Maybe this is the moment that our childhood leaves us, the door to our shared home locked against us forever. Maybe you came to say good bye, to stand by me one more time, the air clean with the perfume of fabric softener. It was strange to see you so small and sad, but the truth is that I miss it too—those days when we were learning the shape of our sibling bond. I would go back if I could. I would be kinder this time, knowing how we would grow together into the future. When I moved to the West Coast you wrote me a letter. I saved it to read on the plane. “I don’t often say this,” you wrote, “but I love you.” I will keep your letter forever. Nothing is as I expected, including what we are now. When you were born I wanted to send you back to the nothingness you came from. I thought you would leave me without enough love to live on. But the opposite was true. You know where I came from, you share the same dark sense of humour, you became an unexpected ally. I wouldn’t send you back for anything. And I want to go home. Do you? 260516 what's it to you? who go blather from