Like I Left It

Like I Left It

Albuquerque is like I left it, only more insistent with its sky this time, and I am still the same person who left it, only paler and less insistent with my own presence: Not ghostlike, but dreamlike.

And this city is short my brother this time, which is too big a thought to think so I try not to think it and I mostly succeed until I see pictures of the childhood promise of my brother, back before we all traded him to a demon to save our own skins.

Learn From Your Mistakes

My brother had a wide and varied group of friends, many of whom I don’t know but many of whom know me. I am his sister, the one who moved from the neighborhood out into the world that no one from here can quite believe exists. Unbidden, my neice says to me, “I can’t imagine leaving my home,” and I want to say, “I can’t imagine it either.”

This is a complicated thought for women in my family, this leaving and returning and leaving again. I am like a magic trick that no one understands and that everyone is a bit disturbed by. I don’t face any judgment that I am willing to accept and it occurs to me that people’s disbelief about leaving reflects a belief that one’s life is not really one’s own.

I belong to this community and to this family and one of the unspoken expectations is that I will not leave it, regardless of how little I fit into it.

My brother was the same way, but his outs are all the acceptable outs for people from this community, from this family. His outs were drugs, jail, death. And despite this reality, I know he was a good person, a generous person, a man with more than one name, more than one belief about his own life and how it was to be lived.

His heart was soft in places where I can’t imagine letting my own heart be soft and his heart was hard in places where I can’t imagine being hard. And what I can do to try to understand this is to suspend my judgment of him and see his choices as choices that make sense within his context. His death was not senseless. He was young, yes, but his death was not unexpected, not anything more than the logical result of the choices he made. And I love him enough to resist idolizing him. And I love him enough to resist vilifying him. And this is the only way I know to love him.