Together

Our mom had a way of shooting a person dead with her words. Like an automated gun, she could fire off insults with effortless speed that needed no guided target. Her enemies' emotional being would be so riddled with holes it wouldn't matter if any arteries were hit, the damage alone was the death. 

But in that way that all weapons had little say over their use, my mother found herself falling into the wrong hands on more than one occasion. Hands that would hold her in all the ways she was built to be controlled. Hands that laid waste to our lands of comfort and love in the name of order. 

John was the first man to find the safety when he played with my mother. Never realizing the power he had he fired her only at us once, in honest jest. Eric searched her. Opened her up, cleaned her out and put her back together. He did it until he understood how best to use her. Eric was the first to show us why weapons have no place in homes. What a mother built of grit and steel could really do. Our hands were never big enough to take her back. Little did we know that staring down her barrel was not the closest we would come to death.  

My brother, Jake, found out first what life on a battlefield could mean. As he crept across fields dressed like living room floors in search of comfort from darkness drenched dreams, he stepped too far into enemy territory. The once sleeping silence of the room ignited with screams of anger as enemy soldiers awoke with chastising blows. Did he not know that this was not a place for him? That this was not his to roam? He came back to me drenched in tears and blood and told me about the landmines of emotion. How easy a step in the wrong atmosphere could blow away a piece of you, if not all. We learned how to scan the room, how to step lightly. He never got that piece of him back. 

Together we learned with each new battle what words, and actions, and inaction could do. Together we fought for the small victories of laughter and silence. It was together that we could survive the childhood that bonded us like veterans in a war. 

Together was 10 years ago. Today sitting across the table from a man who looked like life had never handed him a lemon, I couldn’t help but feel like maybe we would have been better off apart. 

“You look good.” Shifting to try and cover up the lie, he could not sit pleasantly in his booth. 

“Thanks,” I say smirking. I am always smirking. Once worn like armor to hide my fear, it now hides my rotten teeth and stale cigarette breath. 

“I can’t believe she is dead.”

“I can, it took long enough.” I want to laugh, but it dies when faced with a frown on his mouth. A mouth he inherited from her. A weapon already honed to kill my joy. 

“She was our mother.” The war drums beat heavily in my ears, banging out the song of betrayal. I want to scream that she was our enemy! But that was in the together time. We now live in the apart. 

Instead, I ask “You going to the funeral?” We look up at each other, and in that wordless language, we learned to communicate I see enough to quiet the throbbing in my head. 

“No.” He leans back as if pleased by his own answer. “Are you?” A shake is all I can give him. His hands keep shaking, fiddling with his watch and his sleeve. The close proximity of our damage is enough that he has to acknowledge its existence. He goes to stand, deciding better he instead forces himself to look at me again. “My girlfriend is waiting.” I nod if only to give myself something to do, but he takes it as a release.

“Can I meet her?” I try to stop him, to hold him for a second longer. He is smirking now too. Always better at dressing his emotions in the suit of protection, I can’t see past it to see his real face. He settles back into the seat, the fidgeting now finding a home in his foot as it shakes the whole table. 

“Did you want to meet her?” No, not really. 

“Sure.” His smirk falls a little as he really takes me in. As he sees me the way she surely would if given the chance. Not the same as he appeared to be. A strong soldier surged in a facility supervised and well guided. Instead, a soldier enlisted too young, wrecked in a field too advanced for his knowledge, lucky to have survived. She might see that we came from the same bloodied and broken place. And that while my wounds may gape and bleed, he must have scars to match. 

“Is it okay if you don’t?” I want to feel offended but instead, I am relieved. I nod my mouth to laden with emotion to be able to open it. “I am sorry Danny.” I nod again because I know he is. I can see it. I also know that I am the only piece of our past that he can’t lock away into the dark place in his mind and forget about. I am the walking embodiment of everything that went wrong for us.  

“I should go. I have a curfew.” We hesitantly stand, on too unsure footing to be able to walk without pausing. Stopping just before the counter to pay he turns and really looks at me one more time. 

“Call me if you need anything. Anything at all.” It sounds false, but I know he means it. I know that even though we are now a part, that the time we spent together has bonded us in a way that distance could not bend. That one raise of a flag would have him running back on to that killing field to sacrifice all the pieces he held on to. I nod and offer the same sentiment hoping that mine holds the same weight of truth. 

We walk out together but in the parking lot go our separate ways. He returns to a dorm full of opportunity and enlightenment. I return to a solution that promises to erase the pain. We are different. Still, our faces are etched with the same borders drawn in treaties to mark the pieces of our family that we still got to keep. The only pieces that might tell you we were the same. That together we survived a war. That together, we were forged from the same steel mouthed mother, whose heated heart could not break us.