STEPS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Words and Mailboxes

God, how I loved him! A slender hand gripping mine, the trust between us absolute; only the two of us all those early years. Sharing a room, sharing after school time until our parents came home, sharing school holidays when our parents had to work. My increasing rebelliousness coupled with the age difference between us creating the expected distance over time, of course. Estrangement though, this came much later. His path determined early on, and mine, well... ever meandering.

The man he presented today? What could I lay claim to apart from we were related? As his stature grew the chasm between us expanded correspondingly. I stared across at him and I ached. Others - strangers - flocked to him admiring, craving the experience of speaking with, connecting with. I stood outside, observing, ever looking in without participating.

I never told him. How before each game, I'd sit in the grandstand or more recently in front of the TV or the computer monitor. Repeating over and over thirty years now: The Goddess to infuse him with lion strength, lion pride, lion courage. The team too: Speaking to them, the mantra always the same.

"Win for him. Succeed for him. Fight, be strong and win for him!"

Those hours, I am again alongside my brother, everything else ignored, only he and I. A one way conversation I hope, maybe I believe reaches him and connects somehow. I don't follow the action on the screen or on the field, focusing only on his movements, his expressions, words muttered to himself or spoken via microphones to the masses. Pride bringing tears he never sees, pride bursting through, negating all my temporary resentments.

Times I make a fool of myself, calling out to him, my voice tiny in the roar of thousands. Whenever he looks up, waves a hand, acknowledging my being there, the joy overwhelms, the brief connection uplifts me. Whatever passes those moments, the sea of people, he standing alone on the field, searching until he finds me... It negates all the evil, all the darkness - his smile the secret bridge, the unspoken promise we'd get through this, one day.

"I have longed truth be told for one new conversation, contact like the love still rests suspended somewhere in-between the briefest of connecting words with words. Assuring fingertips on arm conveying past emotions timelessly vying for attention. It has stayed. The longing for forgiveness, the storm at times arriving so effortless yet full of electrifying, surging intricacy.

Lightning no longer frightens me when I gaze at autumn storms rolling across the bay. In fact I take my son and we sit on the sand daring, imagining. When one strikes near and hairs rise on my arms, ah it brings my brother near, even as my son gathers me up and drags us away to safety."

Once a person in my own right I have now evolved into 'the sister of'. I carry no public identity, only this blood connection defining me. People attempting to approach me too, only because of this...

"I met the sister of," I imagine them saying back home. It bothers me. I walk head down in crowds, wanting no recognition by default, no tying me to his success. It was his own. Achieved despite the at times horrific circumstances I inflicted on this journey. My guilt accompanying his triumphs, knowing despite his staunchness, he remains ever affected.

It is what it is though. My sun eclipsed before it had a chance to shine and spread its heat, all I can do now is stand in others' shadows. Soon my boys will embark on their own journeys. My father cannot hang on much longer. There's this image forming: My mother and I, living together, just the two of us, growing older and older, till one day she is gone too. The moment when I finally take my first breath of imagined freedom. And cough. Far too fucking old now, too sick myself...

Images of others my own age appearing old. I compare, always compare, wanting proof the years remained charitable at least - some meagre consolation. Yet there are ways to improve myself. Exercise more. Submit my face to any amount of pampering treatments. Dental work. Proper hairstyles, no more the chopping I do myself and the cheap dyes which resemble cheap dyes. I do nothing, inertia keeping me in a state of incompleteness, inadequacy. I am who I am. Deep down I suspect this is another rebellion, another sticking it to conformity. My way of standing apart; the bleached hair, the nose stud, the eclectic outfits differentiating me from those others who have stayed the race and have formed a circle of success, a shared ostentatiousness I alternate between admiring and detesting.

Yet I push my boys. Wanting them away from this monochrome environment we share, wanting them free. I thrust freedoms on them. Where others within this circle protect and cocoon, I send them out to explore, discover, and expand their boundaries. There is no dissent in turn on their part, for I have offered them nothing to rebel against.

Only the certainty one day, they will want away from me, a different reality. They will want free from me. I want this too. No expectations, no impositions other than that they live without strings attached. They've watched me pacing the confines of my cage such a long time; it must play out the way I wish for them - I reason.

Considering my own freedom one day? No one depending on me? Waking up free of demands, other's needs, divisions of my hours? I told the boys one day, I'd buy a Combi van soon. Travel the country photographing mail-boxes. The quaintness of some, the artful ingenuity of others had always drawn me. A coffee table book perhaps, I suggested. Or a blog?

"A million mailboxes, how cool would that be, huh?" I said.

But my son did some basic calculations. Told me bluntly, "You'll be dead way before the first hundred thousand photos mum."

This paralysed me. I was puzzled. "Are you sure?" I asked. "What if I photographed extra mailboxes per day, per week, see?"

"Still not enough," he told me again, shrugging shoulders. I accepted then I had run out of time.

People my age dying, people younger than me. Nikk died! I reason I come from solid stock. Look at my mother - in good health - her parents both centenarians. But then, look at my father and his messed-up well-being! I compensate, say if I hang on another twenty years, technology will afford me a certain longevity. Some miracle invention in a lab perhaps? Tiny bots introduced, scouring my broken, run-down body and renewing it. I only need to hang on, they are saying this, the futurists. Bring it on I tell them. I tell my boys too, about this wanting to live on, even converging with technology to do so.

Still, I live terrified in the moment. The presentiment of nothingness, never waking up - not having lived! My boys the only reprieve in the wastefulness I've called life.

"Don't stick me in the ground!" I tell them often. "If the day comes, scatter me over the water, like Nikk wanted. Burn me!"

Nikk's burial traumatised me, sure. Eyes glued to the coffin slowly, ever fucking slowly lowered into the gaping blackness. His body left to rot, while above flowers and tears piled up. What use? Fifty five years his life, forty of them with me wandering in and out, weaving magical patterns between our shared dis-ease. What use the drunken conversations, tiptoeing around emotions we both sought to decipher? He took them with him, they too rot now.

"I clutch the cheap eulogy she printed and mourn the unsaid wants and my own cowardice in never speaking out. Your voice through me like always, saying fucking bitch life you take the best and leave the rest, those blind and ignorant, those sheepish idiotic minds to roam unchecked above... Promise to never go near that hole you're in again. There. I said it."

In the two years since his death, I have never gone back. In this, I will stay true. Wherever he is, he is away from there, no way that hole could contain his spirit...

And no bloody way, a marble monument to me in turn. No vision of the boys visiting with a bunch of store-bought flowers. Screw that. Imposing this duty on them? Better I drift in the wind. Better they remember me free, finally. Nikk understood. He pointed to my aversion of cramped, tight places, discussing the origin one time, sitting on his friend's boat. The time he also told me he was dying. The time he spoke of always being there still - wherever he ended up - waiting to resume our conversations...  

Hell. To consider this terrifying notion my final resting place?

"On a borrowed cruiser exchanging wine and souls we reconnected. Screw that. Life sucker punched the both of us, at best what's left is awkward should have nots. What exactly has an almost lifetime meant coming and going and in-between time with the rest? The best will never come to that now. One of us chose the wrong direction and the other was a coward. Only you and I sat chattering knowing which one of us was which. And soon now, only I."