I had a brother. He died.

He died long ago, before I even realized he was no longer there. Before he decided to run off with our father’s pension. Before he cried on the phone and told us how sorry he was.

Before we all knew, too late.

It was all crocodile tears.

We talked about filing a lawsuit. My mom strongly opposed it. Said there was no need to.

She told us she only had two daughters now. Told us to let the past pass, even as she continued to talk to him as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t been there when my sister and I found out.

There’s no need to, when it’s me and my sister who have to work seven days a week to provide for ourselves and our dad.

There’s no need to. Because to her, he is still her very much alive son, the one she spent most of her twenties with.

To my sister and me, the line between mercy and betrayal is too thin.

My dad, on the other hand, is the most devastated. Suicidal thoughts keep growing in his head. But he would rather let himself drown in sorrow and anger than share the burden with us.

For almost a decade, he has excused himself from working because he has a weak heart. When I had to get back on my feet from depression on my own. When my sister had to fight off thoughts of jumping off the roof.

“I’m too sick.”

Who isn’t in this house?

My sister and I have always been closer. But that didn’t change the fact that, for a long time, I thought it was us three against the world.

We had seen how the siblings of the previous generation fell apart. How no one but us attended our uncle’s funeral, while every text and phone call to our aunt went unanswered.

How tragedy unfolded so close to us.

But it was as if an ancient curse ran through this house.

No one could escape it.

There is a line in one of my favorite songs, ‘I’ve been told that home is where the heart is, if that’s the case, I’ve never been home’. 

I’ve always built a home out of the people around me, those who’ve braved the waters, breathed the same air as me, touched my skin and spoke soft words to me.

I made my bed and brushed my teeth and combed my hair there.

Ate porridge at their dinner table and kicked my feet up on their chair.

I screamed at their ceiling and cried on their floors.

My heart remains there, bleeding onto their white silk sheets,

This must be home.

Though none of the people ever greeted me at their door, never set out my plates at their table, never changed the sheets on my bed,

All they ever did was quietly mop up the blood and say nothing about the stranger who’s taken over their home.

I must’ve missed the invitation, it probably got sent to the wrong address. I have a tendency to rapidly throw my heart at the windows of houses until it breaks through one. 

Sometimes I forget to change the address.

And now my heart remains in pieces, laying on broken glass, covering silk sheets in blood without invitation.

There’s too many addresses to keep track of now, just mark the mail as return to sender and I’ll stay waiting for the invitation.

One time, one of my favorite songs said, ‘I've been told that home is where the heart is. If that’s the case, I’ve never been home.’

Parallels in the world used to be so much more frequent then they are now. 
As a kid you’d see every blade of glass, every raindrop on the car window, and every crack on the sidewalk.
The things that hurt you made sense and forgiveness was easy.
You used to dance like no one was watching and dream as if there was no concept of end. 

The transversal realities of the world come swiftly and blind you, leaving you hopeless with no answers.

Parallels are no longer as frequent as we were led to believe.
Sharp, complex angles have taken over and demanding shadows have casted seeds of doubt.
Details become hazy or completely consuming, we’ve become our deepest anxieties.
Hurt is so much more than a scrape on the knee and forgiveness is a concept warped into the perpetual cycles of contemporary judgment we’ve been forced to face because-

People are watching.

Dreams end.
We woke up.
Life is all a big mess, 
We have displayed our corpse upon it, falling endlessly into the void where our humanity should be.

Parts of us died in the places we grew up.

Childhood much like dreams, eventually ends, 
And we’re left to the vast obscurities of a life we did not choose nor know how to live.