nixtress's Diaryland Diary

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I'm deep sometimes too

I remember when I was a kid..I thought when my brother K went to live with his dad that it was my fault. I thought I'd been bad and this was my mom's way of punishing me.I didn't want him to leave. I didn't understand that he was 6 years older than I was, and that he was too much for my mother to handle, that he was chomping to be away from her. I thought I'd done something to drive him away.

I wonder sometimes if that's why there's such a distance between us now. Eventually, he came back to us, in bits and pieces. For short amounts of time. Only long enough for his hot water to cool in the other places he'd been. And when I was a teenager, he moved back in for a short while, just long enough to find this neato new guy to get stoned and drunk with, just long enough for me to poke millions of holes in his waterbed after he'd shut my kitty in the vegetable crisper in the fridge, just long enough for him to torture me in multitudes of ways, and to teach me how to almost kill yourself and just long enough for me to fall in love with this stoner friend of his. I was 13 and he was 19. And that was the beginning of a newer chapter, one that ended in my divorce from Stoner aka R. So I know, when people say that everything you do has an effect in some way or another, I know that to be true. I miss my big brother still. I miss the knowledge that under different circumstances, we could be the stereotypical sibling unit. I miss the companionship we had once, while skipping school to swim together in mudholes and his early morning fishing trips I tagged along on. I send him birthday cards sometimes, to the last known address. And I'm afraid, as shattered as our family can be, that one of these days he'll be gone, and there won't be anyone of his blood to put him where he belongs. That we won't even know..because he is so disconnected. And I'm just one person..as hard as I try I can't bandage us all, I can't keep us all whole. And I've tried, God knows I've tried. I can't fix it all. I've barely fixed me. I've done everything I possibly could to keep us together, but it's hard to do that with people who can't or won't even be in the same room without being drunk or angry or ...whatever.

I finally figured out that you can create your own family, if the one you were born to disintegrates. It's all about commitment, and trust.

And a strange sort of kinship.

N.

7:07 p.m. - 2003-02-25

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