bro

My brother and I are children of addicts. I push how I feel about him to the back because I want to feel as though he is always being wronged instead of making wrong decisions. I understand this as a fallacy, thus, I set him aside. I make excuses for why things happen, until they add up & all I have left is to acknowledge that a person faced with so much affliction has surely had a hand in the creation. My brother was in Vegas over the weekend, and since I'm partial to storytelling, I wanted to communicate the full story, but it's not mine to tell - all that is mine is what I feel. I just need to say, in order to remember, that for some reason I've taken a step back to let him live out his own mistakes, to not older-sister him for whatever reason, and that there's a risk here, that I might lose him, in doing so. For the first few years into his 20's I wanted to say, "Hey, it's all good. Get drunk. Experiment. Drink away the pain of seeing your ex with someone else. Blow money. Rack up some debt. Maybe have a few run ins with the law..." There's a lot of freedom there. Kind of sounds like I'm careless. But I think everyone should go through whatever they need to in order to become whoever the hell they'll become. I think there's a difference between this & total recklessness towards the human spirit. I have a harder time actualizing the difference between men & women at this age. I feel like maybe I needed to extend his window of fuckupability, but then I feel like I'm placating him. So, I just push it to the back until I know what to do. My brother almost died last weekend, mixing drugs & alcohol. But this will roll over like a minor thing that "happened to him," rather than because of him. No one wanted to tell me. I almost never had the chance to know because I'm considered either fragile or emotional or judgmental. And sadly, I feel as if I've got this big hole within me, large enough to hear something like this, and have it not disrupt me. I hear it; it comes through as just another thing that's "happened to us." I am of the nature or the nurture, or both, that feels wronged, not wrongful.

This is a weird place: to feel calm in the face of almost-tragedy. To trust in the _________. Which is universe, fate, future, love, family. This place is earned, from pain. This is either learned from pain, or it's learned from exposure, which would mean numbness. It wasn't until I spoke with someone I really love, like a mother, that I felt a stronger sensation, an urgency to understand.

These kinds of things make me think about destiny and genes. How much of what we are born into will affect our future? How much of what is in our blood will create within us our parent's struggles? I have not become my family, their struggles, their addictions, their careers. I have lived my life wholly independently; at times curious what it must have been like for them. Now curious what it must be like for my brother to have been given all of these quiet lessons. Our parents have offered us their mistakes unwillingly & yet it's destiny, blood, recklessness that finds him living out the same ones. There's something here that feels helpless, something like, "I hope you make it through," or, "I hope you'll be able to see things more clearly soon."

I don't have a lot of flexibility for watching someone make their parents' mistakes anymore. I think this is where the coldness arises; why I have a disconnect in feeling something more, more urgency. It's hard for me to be empathetic towards people who are given these quiet lessons, but who are too __________ to notice. That's where I might lose something. I care; it's because I care too much that I've found myself here.

When speaking with this woman I love, this othermother of mine, her advice was, "Tell him you love him, it's all you can do. If he doesn't want to help himself, there's nothing you can do." This is basic. But the love part is absolute. We all need family, especially at our lowest points of un-discovery, right before all that big messy sense of things bursts from the lesson we've been waiting on, just have to make it through the lesson.