Miss You Brother

I miss my brother. But I won't tell my sister.
Sleep is elusive in my bedroom. It hits me like a ton of bricks and then slowly wisps away leaving me with open eyes, restless body and ruminating mind.

I want my brother back: The brother who took me 'up town' and to the Village Store for penny candy, candy cigarettes and coke in a glass bottle. The brother who ate the top layer of my sister's wedding cake with his friend and then responded to my mother's angst with, "It wasn't decorated so I thought it was extra." The brother who taught me how to drive a standard in the middle of a busy intersection at Fort Meade, and told me not to worry when the MP kept hollering for me to "move on! move on!" The brother who married in a kilt and knew a good joke when he heard on. The brother who told funny, knee jerk laughter jokes and went bottle picking with me, 'for something to do'. The brother who gave me the Candy Fashion Doll for Christmas even though my mother told him not to.

I don't know where that brother went, but he's been gone for many years. He traded himself in for the silent brother, the sullen brother, the brother who stopped calling and visiting and joining in at holiday gatherings. The brother who ignored his father while he was dying of cancer and then guilt ridden, visited the cemetery weekly for a year. The brother who stopped talking to his mother when she sold her home and moved to a smaller, easier to manage apartment. The brother who when told of his mother's imminent death told his sister, "I don't want to be a hypocrite, so I won't go to visit." As if that mattered to me. Or my sister.

The brother who sat through his son's murder trial with me at his side. My sister too. Who had lunch with us and when it was over went home. And began to ignore me again.

I stopped calling that brother six years ago. Many, many years after he stopped calling me. I didn't give up easily, but I don't know who he is, how he got this way. We were a close family growing up and now we are disjointed, dysfunctional. Wrong, somehow. Where once we played hide and seek through the evenings of summer, we now play hide and seek in an effort to avoid each other.

How did this happen? Was it just easier to not make the effort, not care at all, than to call, drop by, love back? What changed him so dramatically that he can't or won't be part of our family any longer?

My sister tells me she's well done with trying ... but for me, since our mother died, I find myself carrying the burden of deciding he was no longer worth the effort. For a while I was okay with the burden. I know in my heart there was nothing I did that pushed him away. He left on his own. But I think not knowing that he was leaving us. I think not knowing that he was no longer the person we once knew.

I miss the brother who knew how to be a brother. I feel it more now that the holidays are approaching and although I know I won't do a thing to change how things are, I wish I could face his rejection just one more time, because maybe that one more time would be the time he didn't throw his rejection in my face, as if I didn't matter. Maybe that one more time would be the time he said, "I love you too." back.