Oppa. Bhaijan. Hermano.
Athelphos. Berader. Uror. Akhi.
You have a name, but i
have only ever known you as Bhaijan and that is how I choose to remember you.
I never thought I would
feel the sensation of losing you again. You have been lost for a long time. A
lost cause.
As we drove home from
Khala's house I watched the streetlights pass on the highway, like man made
stars they guide us home. I wondered if you might still be there when we
arrived. Gone you are. What a coincidence of a day. Celebrating God in the fact
that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son to the Glory. Ill consider this a
sacrifice we are all making and let you go. Out of sight, out of mind my
brother. I imagined hugging you, telling you I love you. But I only have the
strength to do these things in my mind. That will never change. Gone you are
before I have the chance to try. That will never change. I miss you before your
departure. That never changed either.
I have said so many times that you live like a ghost in this house. Why does
it feel different now? Your things are gone. Your room is as empty as your
heart. Why does the emptiness that fills your room feel so wrong even though you were
never there? You were never here. Maybe physically. But you were never here.
Having your things there somehow pacified me into thinking that you would be
here, with us, one day. But, with your possessions out of their place, the belief that I hadn’t lost you yet died.
Purging this place of your
presence. What is missing now? The apparition, the hollow vision of you passing
me in the corridor every now and then. There will be no more of that. There
will be no more sliding notes under your door to tell you things I have not the
nerve to say. There will be no more going through your things when you are gone
to know you, understand you. No more listening to you play the guitar outside
your door, holding my breath so you would not hear me eavesdropping on your
only form of speech.
Phantom pain. Believing in a brother that never called himself my own. Phantom. The hurt that houses itself in a corner of my mind that continues to believe you are my blood. Even if you will not.
My brother. You will never
know what you mean to me. You have left so many times, why does this feel so final, so menacing? Maybe because I don’t know if or when you will be back, and I wasn’t even
this worried when you were in the army. Maybe because as you leave this time, I
will never have known you or what I am to you. I may worry that you will come
back different. But my greater worry is that you will come back unchanged.
I always thought DC was a
breathable city. Not too many skyscrapers, not too many telephone lines
crowding the sky. Not much blocking the sky from your senses, not so much
contaminating the breaths we take. But maybe it wasn't the city that suffocated
you, my brother.
