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It’s not the end.
I get up to grab my slippers from the bedroom. I deserve a drink, I think, then walk to the fridge and grab a bottled beer. I sit down and remember the cardboard package on our doorstep, I’ll better screw that lightbulb on, I tell myself. I repeat to myself that writing in clear daylight is what will work best for me, that there is so much to tell that picking is easy. However, hurt watches, lays in wait. Lies are the times I tell myself that I hide because I haven’t found the right words, when the truth is that I fear them.
Stop.
I sit, hit pause and stare at the photograph for such a time that when I look back up there is nothing but a dim streetlight overlooking the darkness.
That’s my brother, Iggy. He would have been four in that picture, ready to take on the Spring with a broomstick as his sword. I can hear my mother, exhaling things like: “I could smother you in kisses, this kid has such soft skin!” I can smell Oma’s baking, the scent of butter and silky soft cream cheese oozing out of the kitchen, through the living room and onto the terrace where she stands with her eye pressed against the lens. I don’t need to ask to know that if Opa isn’t there, he’s already on his way back.
Until one day he wasn’t.
But there we still had many games to play, whole days conquering the wild west and taking over the circus as an act of three (and occasionally four, if Crumble-bread wanted to play with a Babybel wrap shaped around the tip of her snout). Summers left to spend climbing up and down Madrid’s rocky mountains, having picnics on a red and white squared cloth, Christmas eve’s trying to hear the Christkind’s wings making their way into the house with our presents.
Perhaps it is not the memories but looking at the photograph that is suffocating, a subtle dread dampening the corners as I think of them. Take any other, and you’ll see Iggy’s smile turn the whole damn picture into a rainbow. Yet here, clasping the broomstick in his tiny hand, observing, he holds a glimpse of the emotion that would cover his features for years after everything happened. When innocence is betrayed, like a sudden stab on the back. Still now, still in disbelief, still hiding from sorrow.
When he came to visit me a month ago, we had a conversation at the end of which we agreed on how difficult it was for us to separate imagination from the experiences of our childhood. I still remember life-sized castles, wizardry, real magic. Opa turning into a crow that would fly high up to my window to keep me company for as long as I was Rumpelstiltskin’s princess-prisoner.
“And then he died and everything went to crap”, Iggy said to me in tears. “Everything died, everything ended.”
I often wonder if I could have eased his pain better, year after year as someone else passed away, as other things were lost – houses, memory, the instinct to run to a loved one for comfort. Was I selfish to escape, to leave him on his own to build something out of the ruins around us?
“It wasn’t the end, it’s not the end,” is all I could answer. “It’s just the beginning of something else.”