Chapter 11 - You Have Your Brother's Arms
In which I continue Part II - A Game of Chess from my memoir, "My Own Private Waste Land"
“Part II - A Game of Chess” presents several of a great many scenes from my life in which I was compared/confused for my brother. It’s a numbers game. Family resemblance is one thing, but being confused for someone who is dead or who was long absent is somewhat uncanny and disconcerting. You expect some recognition issues, but to the extent they happened, they became as much as part of who I am as who I am apart from my brother.
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11 – You have your brother’s arms
2007. In San Diego, I looked up old friends on the internet, caressing memories like one plays with a loose tooth. One day, I reached out to my brother’s high school girlfriend, who had been like an older sister to me. By chance, she was visiting her elderly mother in Encinitas, 20 minutes north by freeway.
My wife and I met her and her mom, sister, and nieces for a quick catch-up breakfast at a small white diner with puffy, turquoise vinyl booths and mosaic tabletops. There was an Albuquerque connection, talk of school, work, careers, family. My brother was somewhere in the room, in that casual way we consciously avoided talking about him. We took indirect stabs at conversation. A tragedy, of course. So awful. So painful. Nothing left to say.
And then I saw her eyes widen as she stared transfixed at my forearms.
I stopped. She blinked back to the present, raised her gaze to mine.
“What?” I said.
“You have your brother’s arms,” she said, in a haunted voice.
I did a double-take with my wife, remembering Kyle’s reaction in the pool after my brother’s funeral service.
I had not seen her in 30 years, nor had she seen my brother for years, her dead teenage lover. She was now in her 50s, but I didn’t doubt her memory at all.
At that diner, my brother’s apparition shimmered into view and then vanished again.
Who is that walking always beside me?
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I write about:
writing, literature, and the writing life
writing process
memoir craft
mental illness - major depressive disorder, suicide, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder
sailing
alternative lifestyles - polyamory and kink
Until next time, I’ll . . ..
Just keep writing!
As always, thank you for reading. Comments are appreciated. Let me know what you think. Let’s get to know each other. All the best!