The Glue That Mends

I am alone. I was abandoned here not long ago. I remember the contours of his face under the dim sun that shone through his spotless, double-hung window. I remember how he used to smile when I monologized about yet another meaningless dilemma at school. There was something about the way he could grin, something so soft and wise, that always brought me peace. His eyelids hung low upon his dark, hazel eyes. His thick eyebrows shadowed his face. His cheeks would rise gradually as his ears fell back, listening thoughtfully to each word that parted from my jittery lips. When he left, something within my heart left with him. I sit here now on his hard bed. It feels as though my legs are sitting on a bundle of wheat, as if its coarse, thick stems are cutting through my wafer-thin veins. I bleed, but I cannot feel the pain. I am torn, but I cannot sew myself back together. And so I sit here, alone, on my brother’s bed frame. Where have the days gone? How could he abandon me?

When my brother moved away, he took everything with him. He stripped his room down to the bone. I can still feel the sticky green juggling ball I used to clench within my fist as I paced around his room. I remember how its seams tore slowly over time. How each time I threw it onto his windowsill, it would drop back into my hand. And how my palm molded to its imperfect dents. A thick layer of dust has collected on that shelf now, where the juggling ball used to sit. I run my hand through it and clench the remnants of dust and memories until my fingers dig deep into my hand. I shut my eyes and sit back down on his bed.

We moved to this house almost four years ago. He moved with us. He commanded the movers when they brought each box into the gleaming white house, new and untouched. Nobody had lived here before us. I can see him still, standing so proudly at the doorway. “This one’s for the room upstairs at the far end of the hall,” he yelled at the pair dragging in a large cardboard box with a numbered label at its edge. Although we rented the house from a local landlady, the house belonged to my brother. It was his castle, and the fervor within his deep, booming voice conjured a crown upon his head. His eyes lit up in that doorway. Something deep inside them sparkled brighter than the sun. He took that with him too when he left me.

The vault of my memories extends far into the past; this wasn’t the first house we’d shared. His room in Hungary had one of those old televisions. It was the kind that had a slightly curved screen with pixels thick enough to be quite pronounced to the eye. From its back jutted a cube of wiring that was cradled tightly by an olive-gray plastic mold. We would sit in two sagging bean bags with crusty controllers playing a snowboarding game on that aging monitor for hours. Each time we played, there would be a log that I couldn’t quite manage to slide from without falling into the thick snow. “Here, let me show you how it’s done,” he’d say with a sly grin plastered across half of his face. He would take the controller and gently nudge the thumbstick until the character flawlessly ground the log. “You see how I pushed it to the left a bit when he started falling? That’s the trick. Give it another try, I’m sure you can do it,” he’d tell me with an air of confidence and a brotherly compassion in the undertones of his deepening voice.

Entering high school, he would grow too old for his Playstation. He’d pace around his room, eyes entranced by his phone as his face contorted into the most peculiar convolutions. No amount of interrogation would convince him to tell me what he was doing until, one evening, I caught him in the act. He was sending selfies to girls from school on Snapchat, eyes gleaming as he was doing it. Years later I would come to understand his bizarre behavior, but at the time, all I could think to do was punch the lunacy out of him. I sent a fist soaring into his gut. His rough hands squeezed my skin into a twist as I tried to wriggle free. Soon, we formed a sentient hurricane on the ocean-blue carpet as our limbs bent into tight knots. In time our parents would learn that when they heard primal screeches and belly laughter piercing the walls of the house, a serious safety hazard was brewing in his room and that it was in their best interest, as long as they wished to remain uninjured, to remain as far away from that area of the house as possible.

In high school I would pace around his room, much like he used to in our old home. This time, however, I’d be the one talking about girls. He would sit there, heavy eyes and resting lips, as I spewed at him the extent of my social anxieties. He’d been through it all at this point. “Yeah man, high school just sucks, never liked it myself,” he’d tell me. There was something wiser in his voice now, something that had been granted to him by the years since that day he taught me to grind logs with a digital snowboard. He’d never had too many words, but he knew like no other how to listen. There were times when he was typing away at his computer, others when he was folding clothes on his bed, but no matter how busy he was, his steady nods told me that every one of my words was being given a place in his mind. He didn’t need to speak, for his response was communicated silently. He understood, and understanding is conveyed not through sound, but through the entirety of someone’s being. No one else understands quite like him. 

The room, devoid of him, left behind a single companion. There hung in the air a heavy static. Against the backdrop of the far wall, a deep melancholy gray, you could see the dense static churn. Within the silence of his room, I could hear, loud as ever, a heavy rumble. Two steady fists pushed down upon my sulking shoulders. Then on my head, as I pressed my eyes further into my shivering palms. The static was not my friend. It whispered tales of misery into the shattered crevices of my broken mind. It reminded me of what once stood so confidently in its place. When I looked against his wall, into the ocean of static, I could sometimes catch a glimpse of his eyes. I would reach out for them only for my hand to return emptier than before. As I began hallucinating the oasis that was my brother, I concluded that I had gone mad.

Desperation crept up on me. It chewed away at the blubber within my skull. Slowly, I felt it rip apart my senses, my emotions, my memories. My legs started shaking as an untamable anxiety brewed within the cauldron of my heart. My veins poked from beneath my flesh as my boiling blood circulated unevenly through my wavering limbs. I stood up from his bed, struggling to push through the dense air until I reached the door to his bathroom, which connected to my room. I grasped the freezing door handle and turned it. The door didn’t budge. Had I locked it from the other side? Had the static shut me in? I was in a prison, being devoured in my entirety by a monster called emptiness. Ironic, isn’t it? I had to get out of there. I felt my eyelids shutting slowly, signaling oncoming defeat. I couldn’t let myself fall; I couldn’t let the tears stream from their ducts; I couldn’t let the static win. I struggled to the other doorway, outside of which lay a long corridor. I planted my foot out on the floor in front of me. My knee wobbled as it carried my weight. My other foot ascended as my quivering muscles shifted it forward. An emergency alarm blared within my mind, resonating all throughout my porcelain skull. My heel slipped and slammed into the ground. My knees let go of me. I thought I could trust them, but my upper body had been betrayed. My spine slammed back against the monochrome wall as its disks herniated in unison. I fell through my hip and leaned back against the wall as my eyes drifted shut. The static had reached my internal power button and grinned cruelly as it switched me off. Fear grew subdued by exhaustion as the room faded into darkness.

Before me lay an endless valley. A road within wound perfectly from left to right between its edges and evenly narrowed into the horizon. I felt my eyelashes flutter in a cool breeze; a layer of moisture on my lips froze in the brisk air and its bite sent an enchanting chill down my spine. A gust of wind lifted me from the ground and I became the eagle in the sky. My wings trembled as I found my balance. Beneath me stretched the winding road. From its edges flowed two plains of cracking sand, the kind that is bulldozed into a pastel beige under years of exposure to the sun’s ruthless rays. Trees protruded in little clusters from the valley. I felt huddles of bright green and dark red leaves beating to the rhythm of my heart, their pores synchronizing with mine in a pulse that sent oscillating patterns through the dense field of air molecules between us. I dove down, performing an acrobatic corkscrew as I blazed through a patch of lavender bushes that sprouted from a thick fracture along the side of the bending road. A tranquil fragrance seeped into my brain and entered each of my neural pathways. As I flew up once more, my eyes drifted to a close. I allowed a slow smile to spread across my lips.

I woke up with a shiver. The window stood open, and a breeze carried the aroma of a lavender candle left on his nightstand all the way to where I was sitting across the far end of the room. I felt the air in my nostrils as my knees began to tremble again. They had a new strength this time. I rose, slowly, from the wall. Through the open window, I could see the rhythmic waving of the trees. I could see the bright greens of their leaves and the blades of grass on my lawn, each competing to stand taller than the other. Up in the sky, I saw the shifting clouds and a pair of sparrows twirling around each other. Their wings blended as they flew down and up again. They were not confined to a room, but chose, instead, to be confined to each other. They reminded me of the times I would wrestle with my brother on his carpet. We would hold each other in tight headlocks, laughing and rolling about. Stuck in the handcuffs that were his tightly gripping hands, I would feel free as ever, as the room disappeared around me. 

As I began to reawaken, a second memory flooded my brain. Within seconds, the sweet smell of freshly baked croissants emanating from the breakfast platter leaning on a waiter’s shoulder evoked in me a childish liveliness. I could already taste them from where I was sitting at a small marble table with my family. The waiter, whose nationality was exposed by his heavy French accent, came along with a tray of miniature jams. Great varieties of flavors excited my indecisive spirit. As I remember it, over the course of the next week, I would try them all. The palm trees swayed against a vivid blue sky. To my left, two men with thick Bulgarian mustaches bobbed calmly in the pool like two plump buoys. Behind a patch of tall bushes, I could see the wide straw hats of four old ladies. Each of them was concealed by a heavy pair of dark amber shades. As they looked around, you could tell a great deal of gossip was being exchanged between them. Nobody was safe from their trifling judgment. I could feel, as their necks creaked in my direction, a barrage of reckless defamation emanating from their lips. I laughed at the thought of them, so caught up in their own worlds, as I was in mine. I turned back to our table; we were playing cards. The clocks had been put on hold for the day. The frozen sun hung suspended high up in the atmosphere as we spent an eternity at that table, unknowingly forging memories that would last a lifetime. Subtle smiles spread across my siblings’ faces as well as my parents’.

I found myself staring deep into a picture on the cupboard in my brother’s room. It was from his high school graduation. They all walked out of the frame. Each one of my family members stood there, in that room, alongside me. My sister held my hand. My parents exchanged their usual analytical words about something they’d seen. Maybe it was my shirt, or perhaps a family friend they’d seen earlier, or the traffic on the bridge they took to get there. My brother stood in the corner, a faded grin under his thinking eyes. Although he wasn’t vocal, you could read his expression if you really tried. He looked at me, content and at peace. It was contagious.

A third time, a long-forgotten image re-entered my consciousness. The local market was bustling with people. There were old ladies with children in strollers and hairy young men with bills of Chilean pesos tucked loosely into their pockets. A man came up to me with a tulip. Its petals were multicolored. They held within them the deep reds of candy apples in the fall, the lively greens of blossoming trees in the spring, the rich purples of fading sunsets above beaches in the summer, and the modest whites of falling snow across Christmas markets in the winter. I looked up from the tulip to see a market stall filled with every color of the rainbow. I grew dizzy at the sight. As I walked through the suburban town, I began to notice buildings that looked as though they’d been painted by the rainbow tulips from the market. I saw, farther, a series of pictures hanging across a building’s exterior. Inside there was an exhibition. The vibrance of each frame pounced on me as I walked along the hall. Never before had I seen such depth of color. Never before had the world felt so real, so tangible. My eyes could almost taste the definitions of the earth around me. Radiant contrasts and subtle hues filled my dull mind. I was carried, weightlessly, by my surroundings.

I looked harder at the monochrome walls of my brother's room. This time, though, I saw somewhere deep inside, masked by a rigid gray, the deep tones of dark olives. As my eyes wandered, I felt the adventurous browns of his wooden desk and cupboards. The carpet gained a tribal grapefruit-orange pattern with sky-blue accents and chic white outlines. I looked at him again, there in the corner of the room. He was wearing his pastel red shirt and his usual navy blue shorts. His watch grasped tightly around his wrist, the glistening turquoise watch face complementing the hidden seaweed-tinted greens of his eyes. I strutted over to the center of his room and lay down on his carpet. I closed my eyes once more.

⬨        ⬨        ⬨

I am alone. But this time, my memories have mended the shards of my mind. This time, the past is my companion. It lives with me forever. And when he is gone, I will always keep him in my heart. My brother will never leave the corner of that room, the corner of any room, for he travels with me. His comforting smile and his sage disposition will be my lighthouse; they will shine light through even the thickest of mists. I feel the breeze across my face and see him leaning, there, against his olive wall. Behind him stands the door to the hallway. I grin at him. I don’t want to leave anymore.