There was so much time that I didn’t know John. I didn’t grow up with him, not in the traditional sense. Not in the way that everyone else did, where they pulled him out of his chair for adventures and for hide and seek. Not in the sense that everyone else did, where he would go for walks and go drinking with them and their friends.
John and I were housemates. He was in the house and I was in the house but we were miles apart due to our age. We grew up as brothers, but he as a young man and me as a toddler made us little more.
But as I grew up, went to college, and came home an adult of sorts, a newer bond was formed between John and me. Being brothers didn’t matter nearly as much as being outsiders. We were bachelors on the periphery of a spinning mass of parents, spouses, children, in-laws, and dogs. A loud whirlwind that generally spun us a little to the edge where it hurt and we felt a little empty. But it was comforting to have someone else there on the outside with you. And John and I found each other in that. And we reveled in it. We even discovered a certain superiority, whether real or manufactured, in being the ones who stood outside and could rationally look at the whirling dervish for what it was. Other people’s memories are fine and good but I prefer to remember John as that outsider because that’s what we had together.
And so my best memories with John are not marked by words or events, but by the looks he gave me from across the opposite side of the smoky kitchen chaos. While everything else was screaming and laughing, John would give me a look that said, “I see you. I know. You see me. You know.” Or as I drew inward, feeling alone among so many people, he would stare at me until I saw him, and he would give me a glare that would say, “Your self pity isn’t getting you anywhere. I should know.” Or in the moments where the arguments would turn ridiculous and we teetered on the edge of getting angry, John would turn his head my way and roll his eyes, saying, “We are so ABOVE this.” Or he would give me the faintest bit of a smile, one that no one else would see, just to make sure that we were in on the same joke, and that everyone else was on the outside. My greatest memories with a brother who longed to use words but couldn’t were all about the volumes he could speak in silent looks.
I don’t know whether John would have gotten over me abandoning him. When Rachael came into my life, I became so obsessed with being on the inside with her and pulling her into the center of the fray, that I ignored John. Though he still stared at me, though he still rolled his eyes and smiled, I didn’t want to be an outsider anymore. He usually had to resort to yelling at me and at best I sympathized with his outside condition but I could no longer empathize because I was rapidly more and more inside. I regret so much that we didn’t have more time to find a new footing for our brotherhood to stand on. I don’t know what it might have been.
But I have to keep reminding myself that for John, he’s no longer alienated and marginalized. I’m sure he’s having a great time with his legs, but I usually imagine him packed into a group of people so tightly that legs are irrelevant. I always picture him in the middle of an all black, all female, bouncy gospel choir just going off clapping and singing, “Forever God is Faithful”. Or in the middle of a impossibly dense throng of blindingly white robed saints with his arms raised up singing “Holy, Holy, Holy!” to the even brighter Lamb on a throne that is so vividly close. Wherever I picture him, he’s in the center of whatever is happening. So I kind of don’t imagine John running up to meet me at the gates of heaven. In the midst of everything he’s got going on now, he’s way too busy and overjoyed to look back out to the edges. So I look forward more to just randomly bumping into him when we both get caught up in the massive heavenly mosh pit.
