Reconciliation

I cried, and in my tears, he was there. In a red sweatshirt, and jeans. He wasn't smiling, not quite. It was a smirk. His warm brown eyes dancing with amusement. He sat back in his chair, his arms stretched and resting behind his head.

"You thought you said you loved him" he observed. I grimaced.

"I know."

His smile broke from his suppression. There was a hint of regret. Sadness.

"Did he feel like me?"

"Not in the least," I answered with an arched eyebrow. I sighed and mirrored his pose. Looking at him, his intelligent warm eyes, his chestnut hair that curled out from underneath this dirty, well-worn, used to be white hat, his cheekbones that were barely chiseled, his seemingly delicate mouth that was bold enough to say anything, all of him. The carelessness and ease that was Warren sat in front of me, content simply to be. I ignored the familiar stirring within my chest. No, if anyone felt like him, I knew to run.

"I suppose our sitting here means you aren't over me" he began. I laughed, interrupting him.

"Oh, I would never come back to you"

"You never left" he pointed out calmly.

"I left. Oh, Warren, I did leave. And I will never go back."

"What are you looking for, may I ask? What in the world were you using this boy for? You couldn't have been in love with him, since you're still in love with me."

"I'm not!" I protested. I scowled like a child at him. His smile was gone again, his face impassive. We sat like that, watching each other, until I sighed and gave in. "I loved the relationship. The closeness. The imitation of what I could not have with you."

"Ah" he said, nodding with understanding. "But?"

"But what? Why do you always have to know more? You pry too much in places you should never have been in the first place."

"You were the one who fell for their TA."

"Don't remind me please" I rolled my eyes in contempt. "The whole thing was a mistake."

"Yes," he agreed, "but was it unnecessary?"

"No" I admitted with another sigh. "No, I knew he wasn't you. I knew I wouldn't feel exactly the same way. He's not exactly Mr. Dreamy. But I suppose it is something of the same. I wasn't in love with him, but I was in love with something. It was so easy to forget you, when there was something else. Not someone, but something. I did feel this then though too. The need to not stay still. When you left, it hurt because I loved you so. And it hurts now. But the pain, it is not unfamiliar, and it is not unbearable. It is heartache to change. I only hope I can take it better than I did the last time."

"And not find yourself another boy to use you?" he supplied with a smirk.

"I used him just as much" I shot back. We glared again before I let it go and sighed. Silence fell between us, just as it had before. Unbearable silence that we both suffered through, stubbornly.

"Is this goodbye?" he asked the silence, looking away from me. He never could look me in the eye when he wanted me to leave.

"Is it ever?" I asked as I stood, shaking the hair from my face, an act of familiarity for him and for me. He chuckled and watched as I left, letting the door close behind me. I hoped I would not be back.

Inconstant ramblings to set a man on fire

I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

And you know I don't.

But you want me to, so bad that I will leave. And so here we go again, around and around and around, all because you cannot seem to make up your mind.

Or am I wrong? Do you really want me to leave that badly? Will my presence be missed?

None the less, I am gone, bounding away because I can. And you grab at my hand. For free? Ha! Around and around we go.

We race and spin, predator and prey? Enemy to enemy? "You have too much potential to be wasting it on him." But we spin anyway. I dare you to go faster. Double dog dare you, triple dog dare you. Come on and follow if you must. Come on and follow if you can. Can you do it better? Can you beat me at my game? Can you stand on one foot, do you dare?

Catch me catch me if you can. Look, here I wait for you, grab my hand. And in the silence, hear me swear, hear me sing, offer a prayer. And do you know what happens to things that spin? Faster and faster, more movement than ever. Do you know what happens?

It all comes to a point, wild chaos and madness, it all burns with a fury. And with a final collapse of burning movement settling into stillness, a flame ignites and slowly kills. And all that is left is ash of a rotten corpse that used to be you and I.

A twelve-year-old tender mercy

He's about 4'10" with brown hair and dark skin. He's a clear petite Filipino build with Camille's face and a nice big set of front teeth that I assume he will grow into. His voice is cracking even though it will probably not drop lower than it currently is. He gets his hair cut about every two weeks and likes to play video games and baseball. He's a catcher.

When he was about four years old I was packing for girls camp. I took a length of chain--the kind you wear dog tags on--and wrapped it around his wrist. I told him that if he took it off I would never come back. When I got back a week later, my mother scolded me and he presented his wrist, with the chain in the same condition as I had left it. I unwound it and never second guessed his love for me again.

When he was eleven he asked for a sketchbook for Christmas.

"I didn't know you liked to draw," I said.

"I do" he answered. And he isn't that good at it...yet. But he likes to do it and somehow I'm content with that.

Then on Sunday night he told me something odd. "What have you been up to?" I asked him. The usual answer to this question is 'nothing' or 'just hanging out.'

"I picked out my books for summer reading."

"Oh! What books?"

"Antony and Cleopatra and Much Ado About Nothing." The answer took me back. He was going into eighth grade. Did they actually assign those books? Are they nuts? "They gave me a list of books I couldn't read, so I chose these" he offhandedly answered. No, they weren't nuts, my brother was.

"Do you want help?" I asked him.

"Yes" he answered simply. So I volunteered to call him every night around midnight and we would read together. He used to like hearing the stories of the books I read. We would lay in his room late at night while the rest of the house was sleeping and I would tell him of my travels through literature while we both waited out our insomnia.

It still surprised me when he agreed. It surprised me more when I suggested we start then and his eagerness to read the entire first scene by himself.

He was never a good reader. In fifth grade we made fun of him for being stupid. He couldn't read well, and most of the time he didn't know what he had read. I was a freshman in college then, and it bothered me. Why didn't he read more? I wondered. When my mom pulled him out to do home school that year, I volunteered to teach him English. I looked back on the books I had to read as a fifth grader and assigned them to him, then I wrote comprehension questions for him and vocabulary lists. It took him a month to get them back to me because he had to do it through email and he is really bad about doing homework. I suppose the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and I think it has something to with my Dad.

Since then, we would discuss the books he read. But Shakespeare at 12? That was pretty hefty. And it did prove to be a challenge for him. He stumbled through most of it, but then he would take a deep breath and keep plowing through it. Then he would stop and reread it silently to make sure he understood it, and ask if there was something he didn't understand, even with the footnotes on the bottom of the page. It surprised me a lot.

What surprised me the most was when he asked if I was still going to call again the next day.

"Do you still want me to?"

"Yes"

"Yeah, I'll call."

"Ok. I'll see you tomorrow. Well, I'll talk to you tomorrow."

"Ok."

"I love you" he said simply.

"I love you too" I answered before he said goodbye and hung up. I don't think I had thought about him loving me since he was four, but it felt good to hear it. And then I realized how to him, I wasn't his parent, or his teacher, I was his sister. His favorite sister. The one who baked cookies with him in the middle of the night and told him stories. The one who he could talk to when there was no one else willing to listen. The one who told him secrets, the one who asked what he had spent his day doing. The only one he openly loved. The only one he missed.

I am convinced that he is my brother for me.