[written retrospectively]
Everyone sounds like they’re underwater.
It’s like I’ve tamped my brain so concrete thoughts can’t materialize, and as a result, the sounds around me muffle and slide by unheard.
A blissful week ends in mutual blinders-on nonchalance - a coping mechanism to keep parties involved from spinning - paired with a deep set feeling of melancholy. It’s a familiar cycle - the gloom is temporary, something to set your teeth against and bear until it sails on by morning. Rationally, there’s nothing to do but plunge oneself into other things, occupying the mind until the need to be distracted disappears.
It’s been particularly harrowing this time, with unknowns compounding with curious third parties who keep surfacing the topic as I try to bury it. By evening, the emotional exhaustion crests just as my brothers pull up the driveway, home from school.
I retreat to my room. My youngest brother, the stoic, often private baby of the family at 21, follows me down the hall.
Intuitively, or perhaps in reference to the tired sadness that has threatened to spill over all day, he says, “Everything ok?”
I start to summarize, to brush it off as nothing, but the words pass my lips attached to everything that’s been bottled, dragging it out behind them. I struggle to recompose, to keep the wave at bay.
My brother comes over and silently wraps me in a hug. No questions, just the solid support I didn’t realize I was looking for. I sink against his now nearly 6 foot frame and let myself shake.
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and the clouds will have passed. In their place, a renewed spirit, a confidence in connection, and an energy to take on whatever lies ahead. But tonight, I need my brother, whom I see for the first time as a man and not a boy.
“It’ll be okay,” he says and I hear it crystal clear.
