brother

March 29, 2025

I used to have recurring dreams. One of a plane disappearing behind a cloud. Another of my father fading in opacity in the backyard of my old house. My childhood best friend dying with tubes in his arms. Fucking in the gym locker room. Dying in a hospital. I don’t dream much anymore.

I’m on a plane 30,000 feet above New York, about 45 minutes from Boston. Leaving Montréal feels like forever, even if just for a couple days. The airport was quiet this morning. The TSA agent smiled when I asked how he’s been. I recognize him from last time. Let me cut the line to make a flight. Being American right now feels like watching the suburban prefab tiny home you spent your retirement on collapse into itself. Like swallowing. This whole continent, a sinkhole.

Looking for a solitude only accessible to polar bears on melting chunks of icebergs.

I’ve been reading books about young gay men in love. They always leave. Sometimes they end up face down in a swimming pool. Sometimes married to women. It’s a story as old as time. As old, at least, as Gilgamesh and Enkidu. As old as stories.

Floating now. Rachmaninoff. How art can shake like that. How music rumbles. I don’t know. Some things can open this world up like an oyster. Some people too.

I remember when we met. My neighbors were throwing a party downstairs and you accidentally ended up in my place. I saw your shaggy hair as I walked out the shower. I played you songs on my guitar and you watched me like a figure skater. I sang that Jason Isbell song. You didn’t want to leave, but your friends dragged you out. You cried in my arms the other day. Said when you close your eyes you see yourself hanging. I asked if you’d talked to your therapist. “Talking isn’t enough anymore”. That’s when the chills set in. There’s something in this beyond our control. Something beyond our grasp.

This kid, he cries alone at night. This kid sees himself as a negative of the world. An inversion. He loves his friends and gives them his time. Used to do ketamine but gave that up. Couldn’t keep pissing blood. There’s not much to him. Maybe a buck 40 soaking wet. He eats one and a half meals a day. Reads graphic novels and grades papers for spending money. There are a thousand kids like him in Montréal, of course, but he’s the only one who sings with a southern accent.

Someone sent me a video on Instagram of a veteran who rescued a dog when he came home from deployment. The video was written from the perspective of the dog. “I was scared. So were you,” the dog said over a photo of the pair cuddling on a bare mattress. The dog and his owner learned to live in the calm together, a world away from the violence of their past lives. They’d cuddle every night. Go everywhere together. The family expanded. Another dog. A cat. A wife. A kid. Dog still there. Human too. “I started to feel tired.” Dog’s getting old. There’s a guy singing in the background. Sounds like it was recorded through a cassette deck. “I think of you all the time / now that you’re gone” The dog says goodbye.

I’m bawling crying now. Because of the dog and his human. The rescue. The veteran. The war. But mostly because of you. That’s you, living outside the world. That’s you, learning how to love without a fight. That’s you, curled up on the bare mattress. You getting tired. You with your paw in my hand. Your mom said I’m like the older brother you never had. Said you look up to me. I was scared. Scared to assume the role of an older brother. Scared to take care. I made your bed yesterday morning just to see how it would feel. I think of you all the time, like that. Like making your bed in the morning. Mornings after nights you don’t sleep at home. Nights spent out and around. With people who look at me with eyes that tell me they know something I don’t. Something about you and, ultimately, about me.

And then there’s the real older brother. My older brother. He who spends long days in the library. Calls once every other week. Months abroad in places where he can only speak a few words. France, Morocco, Mexico, Spain. Wherever. Somewhere new every six months. He reveals himself to me in memories, anecdotes of a life out of which I’d been carefully excluded. Like the time he left his high school ex-girlfriend and his best friend at the concert to go smoke cigarettes with homeless people downtown. On a bridge overlooking the city. Or the time I found him on his back on the floor of the make-shift gym of our childhood home, talking to the queer suicide hotline because they were the only ones who’d pick up. Countless moments in a life revealed in retrospect.

I remember when his cabin mates in summer camp called him names. He was maybe 12 and his hair was long and curly. Looser than it is now. He told me they’d been cruel to him for no reason. Beat him up. I can still feel it in my chest, the way my heart seemingly imploded and exploded with every word. Breathing in and out like a lung cut open. These punks. These fucking losers. Being cruel to my big brother. I imagined skinning their live bodies. Flaying their flesh. Beating these kids with hot metal rods. Tying them, by the throat, to the back of a sailboat on a windy day. I wanted to ruin their lives. My big brother cried. My face was red. I’d never seen him cry. I cried too. Bawled. Like my eyes were fountains. He touched me and transmitted the grief. Waterfalls of anger. This love in my chest, at a point of enraged climax. My big brother wrapped his arms around my back and held me. I cried for him and for me. For the something in me that broke. Knowing this world won’t love me, even if I let it. Realizing for the first time how young boys hurt each other for fun. Realizing just how young we were in this wooden cabin on the river. Imagining burning it down with us both inside.

You’re on stage singing a song about being alone. About destroying yourself and everyone you love. The lights make your sweat glisten. Your clothes fit like they’ve been tossed onto your narrow body from a distance. Your body of edges. Your left hand contorts to form the chords you’re playing a moment after your right strums. There’s a split second after and before each chord rings out when nothing happens. In those moments, I see you struggle. I see something in the way you suck in your lips that tells me you aren’t having any fun. You used to tell me you hated playing these shows. You hated going on stage and screaming the lyrics to these songs you’d written however long ago. You said it like a rockstar. Like someone who’s done it for decades. But you were barely 20 then. And still now, a year later, you look like you’re waiting for the set to end before the downbeat of the second song.

The phone flashes blow you up. For a single beat, I can see your angles. Your elbows tucked into your sides, long thin fingers wrapped around the neck of the guitar, itself a perpendicularity of your body. Your hair falls in front of your eyes. I see now you’re looking at me. I offer a smile. You return the favor. I can hear your mom telling you to stand up straight. To take care of yourself. I can feel you wondering why. Wondering if there’s a life in all this. Wondering if the music stops for a reason. Or if it could just go on and on until you can’t hear anymore. Just one thick noise. Heavy with pressure. Your left hand falls from the fretboard, but your right keeps strumming. Open strings. Whatever happens happens. Your bandmates are looking at you, wondering where the music went. I’m wondering where you go. I try to read your face, but it’s all noise.

A couple weeks ago, your fourteen-year-old cousin came to visit. You and he slept together in your tiny bed for a whole week. You took him shopping and listened to his long diatribes about random Instagram rappers you’ve never heard of. Except for the bursts of random information dumps, he’s a quiet kid. A lot like how you must have been. Lonely and slight. In love with a world just out of reach. You said he’s scared the same way you were scared when you were his age. Scared of things he can’t describe or control. Obscure evils and perversions. Things beyond. He lay on your chest as we watched some movie. You played with his hair. Loose and soft like yours. Slightly curled. Falling like feathers.

Show’s over and we’re packing up. With the overheads on, I can see now that you’re shaking. I buy you a beer and it sits unsipped on the bar. I know now what you meant when you said, “talking isn’t enough anymore”. I can love you like that. Without words. When I made your bed yesterday I did it to feel like I’d helped you somehow. I wanted to feel in control of this thing breaking you apart. I want to be able to take care of you how I wish my older brother would take care of me. He taught me how to ride a bike. How to read a book. How to write one too. He’s distant now. Just out of focus. I want to love you. I want to teach you something you can teach your little cousin. So I’ll learn to listen.

Last night, after the party, you and I lay on the couch. Almost 3AM. Your head on my chest. We played some stupid videogame and I scratched your scalp. The TV glow met my drunk eyes in a haze. It’s late. I can feel your heart beating. Your body expand with deep breaths. This city, a diorama of a life. Strangers walk by in the light snow. Snow globe city. It’s quiet. You fall asleep with the controller in your hand. We take care.