memories strung soft between us
February 2022
And this is the thing, isn’t it. He is growing up and there are traces of a dutifully shaved beard on his chin and you look at him one day and you have to leave the room for a minute to catch your breath. He speaks in the voice of an adult and it makes you want to drop to your knees on the hardwood because you know that this has to mean that he is not the ten-year-old in the branches of the frangipani anymore and you cannot chase him barefoot across the sand on the Hong Kong beaches and he will not tell you any more stories about Santa Claus — you cannot ever get that back. Time does not know how to fold itself another way than this, and it kills you.
He is going to buy a house next year and all of a sudden the idea of crawling into his bed fresh out of a nightmare is cold and strange and not something you can ever imagine doing, and it rips the heart out of your chest because is this not the same boy who would lie shivering all night at the cost of wrapping you tight in the blanket when the monsters came? You make small talk at the kitchen table and he asks you how school is going and you want to throw the entire plate of food at him because what happened to the boy who taught you to play minecraft on the hand-me-down laptop? That was all your entire world used to be, and now it is this and you have to fight the knowledge back like bloodshed.
You do not know how to express the desire to hold him monkey-grip out of a third-floor window for the fun of seeing the full sunset or to build a fire with him by the stream and sit there watching for crayfish until mum calls us in for bedtime or to race him across the bridge to the treehouse and see who could get up the rotten ladder fastest. And it would always be you who won because he would hold it steady at its base — you could not doubt for even a second that he would catch you if you fell. He built a zip line with you in the back of the garden and now he is building a life with the woman everyone knows he will marry and all you want to do is tackle him to the floor and beg for the boy who believed in the Easter bunny. You have both built a grave for this child. You weep at its ruins every day.
It is Christmastime and there is cologne in his stocking and you want to slam him around the head with it because it smells like what a man would smell like and you can only ever imagine the scent of the football-wrecked grass on all of his T-shirts — not this. The cologne is all you can smell when you hug him now and it’s hard not to break away in tears because his jacket rustles and you don’t know how to step back from mourning the boy who refused second layers for so many years of his life in favour of ‘never ever getting cold’. He was fearless, like that. The fastest boy you knew and all you want to do is ask him to race you across the driveway again but he is a man now and you are more acquaintances than you ever were siblings. You hate it. He keeps making his small talk with you at the kitchen table and you still want to break every plate in the room.
Childhood innocence has been robbed from us and we never even knew to realise and I want to break a bone in my own body for every memory we can never ever get back. You look at him and he is still constantly shifting as an entity, but his movements are subtler now than those of the kamikaze boy who would rescue you from the sharks in the pool. He is your brother. And you love him to the point of ruin. And looking at him makes you want to cry. He is as shimmering golden as he ever was but he has not been a teenager for years now, and it’s not something either of you knows how to deal with. He still moves like a Spartan and you still have the same blue eyes and the same good heart and if you crawled into his bed past midnight you know deep down that he would never ever shut you out. Still, though, the thought is strange. You are both irreversibly damaged by this and neither can say why and you have both just begun to deal with it as best you can.
There is no place in his life for the boy who would run barefoot and cherubic across the garden when there was still dew on every new blade of grass, and you take this knowledge on with the heavy acceptance that this is what growing up has to be. You remember the footprints he would leave on the kitchen floor, fresh and damp and spring-drenched, and you mourn it like an old wound, but he is still the first to comfort you when you search for it and his arms around you are the same arms which would carry you across the pool when you got too tired to swim.
There is a childhood shared, here, and a million memories strung soft between us. He is not the boy he was, and I am not the girl, and time will keep passing no matter what we do to avoid it. He is growing up and so are you but you have learned to memorise the new patterns in the lives that you lead. He has grown up and so have you and things are safe to be left like this.
He will never again be the boy emerging from the Margaret River waves, and you will never again be the girl letting him persuade you to go cliff jumping off the waterfalls in Sai Kung, and you carry that thought with you like grief. You love him, though. You loved the boy as you love the man and he himself is unchanged as a brother. He makes small talk with you at the kitchen table and you steel yourself because this is the life we share, now, but the next day he drives you to B&Q to gather materials for a potato launcher and you look across at him from the passenger seat and the grief loses just enough weight to become bearable. You realise this, right now: he helps you to carry it. He does not believe in the tooth fairy any more, and he mourns too.
