My brother and I have an odd relationship.
Aside from the shared genetics, we’re strangers. I know anyone else I meet better than I know my brother, at any given time. And yet there is something about the way we relate to each other that betrays a powerful link. It’s by no means comfortable–it never feels like it’s safe around him. But in trying to understand some realities between us, I’m getting a clearer idea about the forces involved in the dynamic in which we both move.
My brother is a closed book. My brother is a collection of events, signs that he puts out without any control or knowledge. The ones he knows about, he hides energetically. The ones he doesn’t know about, he can’t acknowledge. Maybe this is all true about me too, I’ll concede that. I wonder if he steps back and has the same thoughts about me, but I don’t think he gets past the thoughts he most obviously entertains as conclusions. I doubt he cares enough to even give it enough of his energy. I’d never ask. I’d never get an answer. This is just the way it seems to be.
When my brother and I were children we were pitted against each other in competition, for what exactly, I’ll never know (though right now it looks a lot like we needed parental affection or attention quite a bit, each more than the other when the other had it). Each of our parents used to love to tell us they loved us both equally–but when pressed, my father displayed his preference for my brother consistently. My mother readily admitted to her preference for my brother whenever she was asked. So I used to think I knew, conclusively, that they both prefered him. But now I wonder what they told him when he asked them, and I was not around.
M. was the first to tell me that my brother’s experience of my parents was different from what I thought it was. He would watch my brother and my father together while working with them, and conclude that my father’s insults and degradations were not really limited to his every interaction with me: he leveled them just as energetically at Edi, whose reactions included everything from open-mouthed silence to spontaneous vomiting (a condition he’s suffered from since he was 12 years old, and continues to suffer from to this day. For which he’s told me he blames me–even though it only seems to happen when he’s working with my father in any capacity).
I guess I am thinking about this because his birthday was just last week, and I spent only a few minutes with him before his day, I didn’t see him on that day. I always seem to think about him when I come across an interesting idea, or a piece of music I think he might really like, or a book I think he’d love if he read it.
When I’ve given him those things in the past, he’s read them, or listened to them–and has actually enjoyed them. But he’s never told me so until years passed. It’s as if I get these things to him in a way that seems disconnected from anything they ought to be connected with: they are quietly given, handed over in the middle of an exchange of pleasantries, never opened up as gifts with the giver present. Never discussed. Strange. But it feels like, under all the other currents of heated competition, active disapproval, fiery and corrosive envy, and forced civility…we’re making a connection on some level.
When my parents are both gone, and the inevitable war that will follow is over, I have this vision that my brother and I will find ourselves formed in an unconditional alliance.
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