End of the Line

photo by Slawomir Chomik

May you never wake in the third hour of morning, the witching hour, the hour of your birth, with the unanticipated and sorrowing yet somehow still unsurprising realization that if you died, most of your relations—both blood and lawful—would not attend your funeral. 

I haven’t spoken to my biological father in twenty-five years. 

I haven’t spoken to my adopted father in eight years. 

My biological mother is dead, her apology still hanging in the air. 

My adopted mother and I stay in touch, though the rift of leaving home as I did took its toll. We are careful with each other, too careful. 

Of my five siblings, biological and adopted, I have a relationship with only one, and her daughter. 

I haven’t spoken to my eldest sibling in twelve years. The second eldest in six years. The sister who is also adopted in I don’t know how many years. 

I’ve never met her husband, her children. When she disappeared, I didn’t know what to do, having given up my right to inquire. When she appeared again, no one told me; only through asking did I find she was alive, accounted for. 

We used to stroke each other’s hair at night. We used to story each other to sleep. 

I haven’t spoken to my little brother in two years, and for many previous years, only sporadically. 

I wanted to reach out to him when I heard about his divorce, and his newest child being hospitalized, and I tried, but he didn’t want to hear from me. 

And beneath the wanting to talk to him was an even bigger not wanting to talk to him. 

It’s not that we don’t see eye to eye. It’s more like we can’t see each other at all. 

I look at him and all I can see is that he’s a cop. The person with whom I once ran through fields and forests, with whom I built Lego cities, Teddyland behind the couch, cheesy quesadillas while watching SpongeBob, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lord of the Rings on repeat, with whom I played and dreamed and laughed and fought and fought and fought, no longer exists. 

At least that’s what I tell myself. 

The truth is more painful. The truth is that I love a cop, or I don’t know how to love my brother, or I am bad at loving, or I don’t know how to stop. 

Still, I worry deep down I only strive to be right. 

I worry I am not revolutionary but another kind of puritan. 

I chose instead to walk away, shut doors, nurse my wounds in the dark. 

For there are wounds. I wanted to be loved in my fullness. I couldn’t find that there, with them—couldn’t be myself among the people who shaped me. Or wouldn’t. Didn’t know how. 

It’s not as if I’ve committed some heinous act, not as if my family hates me. Hate would signify a presence of feeling, the feeling itself maybe, maybe not, mutable. 

What I sense is a lack—a conspicuous absence. Indifference. 

What gives birth to it? Why doesn’t it writhe? It lays there, corpselike, souring. I should bury it. 

Burying is an act of love. We give the body back to the earth. 

My biological mother was not buried. There was no funeral, no weeping, no ritual to ensure her safe passage into distant lands real or imagined. She was turned to ash. 

I do not want to die alone and violently, as she did. 

Forgive me my selfishness: I want to be mourned. 

I don’t shoulder all the blame, but I do shoulder the weight. The weight of my independence, the weight of being able to live my life authentically, the weight of not having to explain to someone else that I or someone that I love is human. 

Is it wrong to turn away from someone who denies your humanity, the humanity of those you love? 

I’m not sure that’s even the right question. 

The truth is, I’m not sure I ever even gave them the chance. Or if they had a thousand chances.

I’m thinking of how I told my therapist that it seems so many people are motivated to heal from their trauma out of a desire to not perpetuate cycles of harm for their children’s sake, and how rather than making me feel exempt, my lack of desire to reproduce—or, rather, my abundance of desire to not reproduce—actually increases my sense of responsibility to heal. I am the end of the line.

I unpeel my pain like fruit, fat and full of promises. I hold the sweet nectar in my hands: my ancestors are waiting. I am too. I feel the sticky center. 

Who will hold the seeds if not me?