the desert is in the heart of you brother
So I drove out to my parents' house to say Hi, only to realize that they aren't here. I think they may be out of town even. I don't know.

I found a picture of my brother in my mom's bathroom. He is quite young, maybe 8 or 9, holding a smaller boy on his back. It made me want to cry.

I have't had more than one 'real' conversation with my brother in over a year. He is very different from me. It hurts me to see him, causes me actual physical and emotional distress. He is very very unhappy, I think. He has to be concealing so much misery. He always looks so worn out.

He's had a lot of broken hearts, he is constantly getting engaged to nice Christian girls and then getting dumped. He is very very evangelically Christian, active in our parents' church. I don't think he drinks or anything and I know he doesn't have sex. He just seems like a soulless robot when I see him. I am sure he thinks I am going to hell, so I guess we're even.

We were never close. I was always semi-ashamed of him as a little girl, I was a very bright kid, my father's favorite, a precocious bookworm, drawing and writing and determined to be Pippi Longstocking when I grew up. He, on the other hand, has learning disabilities, was an average athlete, much more like my mother. He has very bad social skills, he is so outgoing that it turns people off, like a 9 month old black lab who won't stop jumping on you. He used to get picked on a lot, the big kids would throw his books in the dumpster, he was always getting teased for asking out all the girls in the grade. I never stood up for him. Instead I mocked him mercilessly. He had to go to playgroup therapy as a kid.

I think he was sexually abused. I found out a few years ago that he raped my cousin when I was 11 and it made me remember things that I hadn't thought about. I don't think he ever actually touched me, at least not under my clothes, but I remember being very uncomfortable around him and scared to be alone in the house with him. I feel physically sick, nauseous, if I think about it too much so I think I am repressing memories. He used to pin me down and breathe on me. Chase me with knives. Make very sexual comments to my friends. Recently I was wrestling with a friend who lay on top of me and pinned my wrists up over my head and I had a panic attack, I think it may have something to do with him.


I have never really talked about this until quite recently, never identified the things he did as abuse. There are a lot of things I need to try to remember. The two years before I was put into longterm inpatient drug rehab at 13. The reasons I went from being a spunky, somewhat nerdy little redhead in white keds and teddy bear sweatshirts to being an angry and depressed skinhead who climbed out of her second story window to get high at the park with the older kids.

I mourn for my brother. But I haven't dealt enough with the past to reach out to him. Maybe one day I will. 

we hit concrete @ 1:03 PM