Dear Reader,

How are you? I’ve missed our talks. I miss you, would you believe it? It’s easy to forget how much I loved you you know? In those golden, endless days, those summers where we spun worlds in our back yard.

I wish I knew then, I wish I understood how to be a person, I didn’t know that leaving would break us, I didn’t know how to be kind. When I came back I wasn’t welcome anymore, I was away too long, the gaps closed, there was no place I fit.

I wasn’t angry with you, but I didn’t know that either. I didn’t understand. I was not kind. So the little hurts of missing those years, of walking out of your childhood and back into your life, they became scars.

You were angry too, you were hurt too. The weight of expectations and comparison. A life set out for you. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how to fit in my old place. So I left, I left, I always left, I ran and ran from family, friends, and lovers until I broke myself and fell into the dark.

And you were there, the irony, in those moments where both of us were almost free we were together again, once or twice we talked again. But we had found ourselves in that darkness, and picked different paths out of it. I had not learned yet to be kind, so I was indignant. I couldn’t understand why you would go back, I was so desperate for you to leave I raged against it, I cast judgement and shame, and wore away what little goodwill was left.

And then I started to fade, we stopped talking, and I went away and began to become a different person. My faith broke, our father killed my god in front of me, but that’s another story. With that I was free, finally. But I lost you.

And so, my sisters’ brother became a ghost. And his choices, the flaws of him haunt us all. I look back at him like a hazed memory, he doesn’t feel like a part of me. I feel like everything before I started to change was a dream, like I was locked inside a puppet person playacting at being a boy.

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It’s been a year, or so, since I stopped fighting to be who I thought I should have been and started becoming myself. I know a lot of this won’t make sense, my Reader, and it wasn’t what I set out to write. I was thinking about how being so shunned in my family now I feel like a ghost. I stepped into the margins and faded out of their lives. My father has spoken to me maybe three or four times a year since I left college, my mother tries sometimes, and my sisters don’t speak to me at all.

So a ghost, a thing that the family lost. I guess. But I started to write and what came out was a dramatic lament of the death of my relationship with my sister.

Dear Reader I wonder if I’m coherent in my rambling. The tragedy is this: that through that darkness, all my mistakes and hurts I caused through my actions, the outturning of my self destruction, I became a better person. I would not have changed if I had not suffered. But I carry the guilt, and the consequences, of the bridges I burned, the relationships I destroyed, along the way.

I am not justified in the harm I cause. But I knew no other way. And so I choose to become a person who is free of the religion and family I was raised in, and I hurt people in the leaving. So I will be this ghost to them, haunting the edges. It’s not so tragic to be forgotten.

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P.S.

Thank you, Reader, for indulging my melancholy this morning.

I hope to see you again soon.