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you can come and see if you want to
Mar. 17th, 2009 08:09 pmMy vacation, which was lovely, was as full as I wanted it to be of books and movies and walking and shopping and exploring and toddlers and family and treacherous staircases and lobster salads and rooftop observation decks and dolphins and jellyfish and crabs. It was fairly relaxed, which is something of a feat for a family headed by the type-a-est of all possible type-a personalities, and the place we stayed was frankly spectacular: much nicer than (for example) my own home, floors more polished, bedspreads plusher, views more soothing, bathrooms for all. It was a good week, and could only have been made better by the presence of a working internet connection. And possibly more Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
So it was a good week, definitely, but what I came away thinking about on the loooooong, wide-open ride home was not so much the vacation as my brother, and specifically my relationship with him, which. I guess if I'm to make you understand how my brother and I fit together, you need to understand how I work with people in general. For me, people I genuinely love are not divided into friends and family and lovers; for me, they're just all essential, and everyone else is nonessential, and it doesn't matter whether I share DNA with them or fuck them or just generally want to be around them, I love them equally passionately. As unreservedly as I know how. And okay, it takes a long time for someone to cross from nonessential to essential to me, but once they cross over, they're there for good, and no absence or resentment or catastrophe has ever really severed that essentiality for me. Is that creepy? I can't decide if it is or not. I'm a little too close for objective conclusion, here.
Anyway, my brother is an essential person. He's very different from me, wants different things from life and approaches life in vastly different ways. And we don't actually talk that much; we don't exchange emails, and we call each other for our birthdays or to ask specific questions but never just to chat, and we see each other maybe three times a year, on a good year, and more usually once a year. And none of that matters, because when we see each other again, we slide back into an easy confidence in each other that never seems to warp or shift, no matter how much our lives change, no matter how far we are from each other, physically and mentally. We just understand each other, is all, and whenever I see him, I'm glad that he's so constant in my life, living proof that as seriously appalling as I am at human relations in general, it's occasionally possible for me not to fuck everything up.
It's a comfort. He's a comfort. It was good to see him again, in this context, without the swirl of activity and white noise that comes with our family gatherings for the past few years. That alone would have made the trip worthwhile.
So it was a good week, definitely, but what I came away thinking about on the loooooong, wide-open ride home was not so much the vacation as my brother, and specifically my relationship with him, which. I guess if I'm to make you understand how my brother and I fit together, you need to understand how I work with people in general. For me, people I genuinely love are not divided into friends and family and lovers; for me, they're just all essential, and everyone else is nonessential, and it doesn't matter whether I share DNA with them or fuck them or just generally want to be around them, I love them equally passionately. As unreservedly as I know how. And okay, it takes a long time for someone to cross from nonessential to essential to me, but once they cross over, they're there for good, and no absence or resentment or catastrophe has ever really severed that essentiality for me. Is that creepy? I can't decide if it is or not. I'm a little too close for objective conclusion, here.
Anyway, my brother is an essential person. He's very different from me, wants different things from life and approaches life in vastly different ways. And we don't actually talk that much; we don't exchange emails, and we call each other for our birthdays or to ask specific questions but never just to chat, and we see each other maybe three times a year, on a good year, and more usually once a year. And none of that matters, because when we see each other again, we slide back into an easy confidence in each other that never seems to warp or shift, no matter how much our lives change, no matter how far we are from each other, physically and mentally. We just understand each other, is all, and whenever I see him, I'm glad that he's so constant in my life, living proof that as seriously appalling as I am at human relations in general, it's occasionally possible for me not to fuck everything up.
It's a comfort. He's a comfort. It was good to see him again, in this context, without the swirl of activity and white noise that comes with our family gatherings for the past few years. That alone would have made the trip worthwhile.
