Closing a Gap

I’ve spent almost eighty percent of my life separated from my two older siblings. My sister Carey lived with us until I was five and my brother Jackson until I was eight. I was born too early to feel entirely like an only child, but too late to ever feel privy to anything in their lives. They were touring colleges and discovering what they wanted to do while I was still learning how to read and write. Consequently, much of my life between the ages of five and eleven comes back to me through intersecting memories, as I spent so much of that time visiting one or both of my siblings at Swarthmore College. 

The Greek-style outdoor stage where I watched them graduate is as constant in my mind as the old trees around which the theater was built, with their snarled, mossy roots and long, intertwined branches. In the place of walls paneled with wood to dampen ambient sound, thick stands of trees border the clearing. Where the top of a curtain would fall above a stage, a swath of sky free of leaves and branches hangs between the stout trees that frame the low stone dais. Regardless of the number of people there, walking into it compels you to quiet yourself in anticipation, even on a perfectly ordinary day.

Both of my siblings graduated on perfect May mornings. The thick leaves overhead created the illusion of looking through stained-glass windows as patches of light broke through, dappling the ground, and the cool dry air that felt pleasant to me must’ve felt like a miracle to the students standing still in their heavy black robes. The amphitheater was divided into a series of rising stone stairs, each of which gave way to a few feet of grass and created a pleasant series of green and gray circles outward before rising another level, the smooth rippling pattern broken on occasion by tall trees whose bases went uncovered by slabs of rock. I amused my much-younger self greatly by balancing on the edges of the steps––barely shorter than I was––in the few minutes of quiet before the space began to fill. Isolated as it was on the campus, tucked away in a corner away from the chatter of students or the growl of cars (a fact I appreciate more now, as I was originally too annoyed about the long walk from the nearest parking lot to appreciate the quiet), the amphitheater was a place where one could not help but focus on the speaker, as all sights and sounds from the outside were dulled or obscured. The silence in the brief seconds between speeches by the head of school, valedictorians, and others was absolute. Perhaps faint bird calls or errant coughs have been filtered out of my memory by now, but the recollection is filled with nothing but hush. Not an oppressive silence with the boom of a microphone still resounding in the ears of the audience, but a silence as light as the feeling of a sheet in summer.

As I sat and waited for Carey’s name to be called, I jittered with restless energy, bouncing my feet off the stone steps. My parents reluctantly let me absorb myself in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, disregarding the several hundred students on either end of the alphabet and only looking up when they reached the P’s, but clapping hard enough for all the students when they called Carey. 

Three years later, I was unfortunately a little too tall to kick like I had, and my feet reached the ground rather than dangling in the air. My parents believed I was mature enough to sit through the long procession, so I had to resort to playing with blades of grass while listening for Jackson’s name. I remember methodically separating each blade into a dozen or so little rectangles, a few millimeters wide, before scattering them and watching them drift like autumn leaves back into the grass that remained standing. I still only looked up at the P’s and clapped several hundred times harder for Jackson, but as my brother walked up the steps and took his diploma, I gained a bit more appreciation for the importance of the ceremony. I think that was the first time I wondered what it might be like if I stood up there in ten years, maybe as tall as Jackson or as accomplished an artist as Carey like I’d always wanted to be.

It was strange to return to the amphitheater five years later for a college visit during the height of fall. The crunch of leaves underfoot felt almost alien, incompatible with my memory of nothing but springy grass, and my shoes, several sizes larger, didn’t find the same purchase they used to on the stone steps, though I still tried to enjoy myself by balancing on them. It was what I imagine an out-of-body experience to resemble, feeling a couple feet too tall for my own body, alarmed by the sharp angle of my legs when I sat down, no longer needing to stretch them to touch the ground. The grass was still there under the crackling orange leaves that blanketed it; the stones were no more weathered than they had been; the trees still stood heavy and solid where they divided the rows of seats. Only vague recollections like those––yes, the sun did used to strike that trunk that way, yes, the grass was still as green as it had been––helped me realize it was the same amphitheater. 

The last time I saw Jackson, near the end of the summer, he still had several inches over me, and in the intervening years between my visits, I had never become the fencer or instrumentalist he was. I was taller than Carey and a little more confident in my art than I had been, but by that point she had become a writer and illustrator already hitting the New York Times’ bestseller list. At the moment, all of that ceased to be relevant, and it felt like I had taken a stumble back in time. The place became a conch shell, with me as the unsuspecting child who believed he could hear the ocean by putting it up to his ear, and I heard again the ambience of those fall days, the shouts and cheers of graduation in 2010 and 2013 with my parents and me receiving my sister and brother. They were still my siblings, but maybe, I had realized, it didn’t matter whether I could beat or even match them at their own game. What I was doing, even in visiting Swarthmore, was playing my own.