It’s a strange thing to be 17. I feel as if I’m constantly right. Deep in my chest, I feel it. It’s strange because it feels as if I could do no wrong, that my skin keeps me invincible, and also that every step forward is another mistake. I am constantly torn, begrudgingly torn, between my will and that of my parents. I walk on a tightrope stretched between the pillars of childhood and adulthood. I step towards bike rides and popsicles, just to retrace my steps. It seems that I’m much closer to paying rent and typing and highway driving. I am stuck at a crossroads that I didn’t know existed. My bed seems to have a greater gravity than before and suddenly I’m booking appointments on my own and buying gas.
My brother leaves for college in less than three weeks and I’m pretty sure I could’ve been nicer to him. I really like him, I just don’t express it well. It’s a scary thing, getting older, and no one teaches you how to do it gracefully. They just plant nicotine and strange websites and college mail under your nose and expect one to navigate. No one discusses these fears partially because no one knows how to address the feeling of being pulled from one sublime into the next, and because I think we are all doing it at the same time. They throw us into the deep end and expect swimming. A thousand more days could pass but still, I wouldn’t be prepared for hearing my parents fight or hating the way my own house smells. I am not ready for the day that my brothers stopped coming into my room to chat and having to do hard things like make my own dinner.
It’s difficult to communicate what it feels like when your brother moves out soon, but I guess it’s mostly sad. We’ve lived together for 17 years, all of my life and the majority of his, and one day soon he will be gone. His bed will be permanently made. He will be gone, in another state, studying the things I wish I had a mind for, and I will be left here, now the oldest, attempting to fill spaces in dinner-time conversations. He will take all his favourite t-shirts with him so I guess it’s time for me to buy more of my own.
The white walls of our house are permanently stained with the ink of his music. The songs he tortures the piano with and the jazz he’s just discovered, the funk he plays when his windows are down and the songs of mine he secretly likes, playing softly in his headphones are an indelible mark on my adolescence.
My brother plays piano better than anyone I’ve ever heard. Often, it makes me cry. Sometimes I cry because I hate the pounding, the rattling of the keys, screaming against each other long after my ears have grown tired. Other times I cry because he’s taught his fingers to dance between the black and the white; his songs are what I think it would sound like to live on the moon. And still other times, most frequently, I cry because I know I will never be as good at any instrument as he is at his piano. His songs steal my breath just to reproduce it. I joke to myself that I continue with piano and also guitar because that’s two instruments to his one. But regardless of how many others I might learn: banjo, harmonica, drums, dulcimer, I’ve never pulled tears from dry eyes with my music the way he does with his.
He has a mind for the music. When he closes his eyes the notes morph into visuals. The ink spills itself across his canvas, his paper, the darkness of his ceiling. He writes songs by accident. For hours he sits with a pencil on that cold black bench annotating, tinkering, unsatisfied. He is pushed into bed, still restless, because Mom or myself have begged him to stop the noise. He worships Elton John and this obsession clearly emulates itself within his work. He writes songs that I hate because they are too noisy or too fast or wholly unfinished in my mind. But when he tries, really, really tries, his fingers are not cymbals, they are not cement against the keys, but trickle lightly like morning rain or cicadas on a summer night.
I think his talent is to blame, raw and hot from the womb, but more so at fault are the hours he spends in the semi-darkness clinging to his shiny black companion, the piano. He has more passion for one instrument than I do for anything else I’ve ever done. Sometimes when I talk to him, I swear he can’t hear a thing I say, because his true love awaits him at home. He is already conspiring about how his delicate fingers will punch me in the gut just to pick me up.
Despite the monotony of the constant noise, his music is a comfort. It is a reminder of his consistency, of his stubbornness. He often taunts me with only the sounds that his fingers can make because mine never will. I am grateful for his music, yet it drives my fist into the wall. My hands brace my head from the blows and from the banging. Distress creeps slowly up the stairwell when I shout down to stop. But he will not stop. He cannot. He will not sleep until his itch is satisfied. I am in constant admiration of his talents, of his passion, of the growing disease that infects my brother. He sacrifices himself to his music in a way that I never will.
Part of growing up, probably the most important part, is a gradually increasing respect for one’s siblings. I miss his car when it’s not parked next to mine; knowing that he’s nearby is a comfort in itself. It will be strange when he moves out – his floor will be clear of dirty laundry when I walk by and I will now be the last to fall asleep. On Sundays, his chair at the dinner table will wait for him perpetually and we won’t buy nearly as much milk or Goldfish or Ramen noodles. There will be no one to eat ice cream with past 10 o’clock, the laundry will be done much faster, and I will be forced to learn how to maintain a never-ending dialogue with my parents. The cogs and gears of the family will disassemble themselves, their fingers reaching for each other’s, only to come up empty. I will try to learn the proper tone in which to tell jokes in order to make my mom smile.
A year or so ago I drew a series of small pictures on sticky notes that still hang looking over his desk. And last week he asked me what will happen to our pet sheep, the one scribbled in my ink, that looks over his room. I said I didn’t know, that I guess he will stay here, but Nelson insisted that his sheep must go with him to college. He told me our pet sheep doesn’t like to be left alone or live anywhere other than over his desk. I confess, this small exchange, our inside joke, made my chest tighten. Nelson has never been my best friend or even my favorite brother, but his absence is sure to sting.
MAGGIE STEWART 