Passages, April 2021

I Write Passages So I May Make My Own

On a spring day which I was overdressed for, my brother and I walked to the town park, though I let him get a head start. I arrived and waited for a girl from my old class, who I hadn’t seen since a party I cannot remember in sixth grade. She told me all about the party, which she could remember perfectly. We sat across from each other with six years and six feet under twice over between us, though it was both her parents who had lost themselves and neither of mine. We disagreed over whose fault it was that we had acted of our own accord. She said she was mean and I said I was creepy, and we agreed that the other was guilty of nothing.

At some point in my life she was a party girl to me, seen for a brief moment and forgotten about. I would give her anything but my time, which I didn’t value at all. She was not the guilty party, then or now. We were unwavering ideologues on the subject of our own blame. Our debate was quick but fierce. I recognized that as much as I had politicized myself she was a political party’s girl party girl and I was but a boy who had only ever been invited to a single proper party. I asked the same of her and she confessed she never had. We both agreed that parties are a waste of time, especially the people there.

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I think daily of the soldiers, camped in Babylon. Years of fighting had brought them much, but there they were, lying beneath stone ruins greater than anything built in the present. They had fought all their lives for less than their ancestors had taken in a single battle. What do you do when what has come before you is greater than anything you’ve ever done? Should you replicate it, seeking that same greatness? And when you replicate it, do you assume that you, who never created but replicated, are somehow more capable of preventing its collapse than its creators?

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If I had a bit more courage then, I could have shoved him away and done what siblings are supposed to do. Now, the weaker he gets the harder he is to envision fighting. He is as good as ghost now, and I cannot fight a ghost. Just look at him. He fought ghosts every day of his life and now I tell myself that every swing at me was accidental, an attempt to make contact with something I could not see that stood between us. The worst part is that he never even hit me. How I wish he had, so that lying on the floor I could stand for something and maybe then I’d shut it with these wishes of experience-not-consequence. But if he wanted me to shut it, I never would. Not then and not now. I’d still sit on the stairs taunting that if I had to say please he had to say please as the hurricane swept us up together. I would be gleeful in that death, where what I said had no impact on whether I’d live or die, but quite a lot of impact on how I’d feel.