To Quinten

  There is an orange plastic desk upstairs in the hall, with a matching red plastic chair. My brother sits crying in the squat chair meant for people five years his junior. And no ten year-old boy should be crying this way. The small pale frame had run up the stairs, long legs flying. The sobs remind me of myself and I’m scared- we are the same person by 99%. My not-so-long legs follow the path he took, and I sit on the floor eye-level to his red face. God, I know I’m doing this wrong. What do you say to a little boy who hates himself?
  We are mirrors, because now my face splotches up with tears, family thing I suppose, the blotchy face. I hug him first, hold him tight and say nothing. He is bird-bones, and I fear he’ll fly away before I’m ready to let him go. What to do to keep him here, to make him know I love him enough? We are too similiar to talk yet. He tells me math is too hard, he isn’t good enough and I cry when I understand him completely. We are both born under bad signs, and the cosmos and genes are against us. I want him to know he isn’t an island. We are all islands, with a sea to hold us to each other.
   I tell him he is good enough to do anything. I want him to be an astronaut, a philosopher, I do not want him to be me. He will not be a mathematician. I tell him its ok to not be good at everything. He doesn’t quite understand yet. A fourth grader with an anxiety bigger than the Pacific. To fail a test is human, and he is human, I tell him we aren’t perfect. He nods and cries and reminds we are all vulnerable.
   Funny, to see yourself cry, he’s my twin seven years too young- and I remember his baby feet and the time he bashed his teeth in. When he was sick and I wanted to puke from my sadness. How I cried outside the hospital nursery, wanting to hold my young sibling. And now he has gawky limbs and a patch of teal hair, tall and suntanned and ten. The years have gotten away from us, and I can count the times I’ve said “I love you” on my fingers. He shakes with sobs, tells me things other-worldly I cannot believe he knows. I want to say “book smarts aren’t important”, and “I know you are good enough”. Instead I tell him to try his hardest, because he is smart and I know he is powerful like a summer thunderstorm, beautifully frightening in his movements and mind. We talked about black holes in the dark of a movie theater weeks ago, and he moved his hands when speaking, listened and told me “space is big enough for aliens”, he asked “wormholes don’t have time in them?” We ate popcorn and I knew his heart could never be a black hole.
  At the desk as he cries, I know he is not the brightest, little kid with knobby knees who likes hockey in our driveway without fears. We bend our heads like in political pictures, telling secrets about bombs. We recognize our hearts as bombs, I can tell. The bad signs, you know, make us relate. I take the image as a Kodak, and christen it with my crying. I want to say, “You are perfect”. He makes me understand, the value to my learning isn’t books. I want to sit with him in cinemas for my life, exchanging queries on space, time, and human sounds. He still stumbles in speech.
  We come to a point, I promise to help him with his math, tell him he is smarter than me, I have to use a calculator for long division, large multiplication. He can do it with hands, tame numbers like a lion trainer, though maybe one with only one arm. Young boys should drink their milk to make their bones all tough, but this one should cry on my shoulder, we could water each other, make sure we grow crooked and perfect. Leaning shade trees, I want to slip n’ slide and make poop jokes for the rest of our time in this place. We are quiet, tears rolling in snail trails, until his arms, I’d never known they were so jagged, are outstretched to me, and this is the greatest gift I have ever seen. We clasp trembling bodies and I know we’ll be ok. The red screeching bundle I had cried for, I have finally reached. 

[This is a piece I wrote for our nonfiction cross-writing workshop- the prompt was to write about someone important to us. My brother is important, and this is for him. I love him, and all the events in this piece actually happened for once.]