*The following writing -- rough draft -- is a part of a chapter in progress per the book my brother and I are putting together. It correlates with the next entry, which is what I read for my public reading selection in my writers workshop. Sharing with those of you not able to be at the reading, so as to include you in the process.
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I have my own box of letters from my brother. Unlike him, they’re not kept beneath my bed. Opened and read. Kept together for company. I’ve never bothered to count them but it wouldn’t matter. It’s like counting sorrows or numbering the sadnesses of a life. Because though my hope has pushed me onward and my faith has forced me upward, my very frail and human heart has often dragged along the lowest points of emotion where Gary is concerned.
They were never enough. The letters, I mean. Much like the sporadic fifteen minute calls which dotted our means of communication, they seemed to just get started in the job of bringing us to that spot where conversation hits its stride, when he would sign off. Didn’t matter it was one page or six. When I had time, which became less and less a commodity as the years fell away from his sentence and his life, as the years heaped people and activity into mine, I hunted for the unsaid between the lines. Wishing for more. Wanting to see him in the words, a face emerging from the familiar pages provided him via the courtesy of the State of California. Though his writing was often refreshing and good company, I knew these few sentences strung into paltry paragraphs, which often encompassed entire days or weeks of incidents and emotions, were not adequately expressing what his life was for him in there. And without that full expression, I could not empathize and understand in the circumspect way that I wished. That meant my help would be lacking. Not without merit but simply and sorely lacking.
It took energy for him to write on a regular basis. I realize now that his mind must have often raced far ahead of his hand as he fought to capture his thoughts between bouts of mania and depression, sometimes violent drug-enhanced mood swings within a twenty-four hour period, and secure them in ink for the long ride out of California and into my awaiting mailbox. But I didn’t have that awareness before October of 2008. Though I could decipher changes in his temperament by the tilt and sway of his penmanship – one week neat, concise, straight across, another week messy, wandering, sharply angled – the way one understands a child or spouse is of sunny or somber disposition by the timbre and sound of their voice, I did not detect the circular path of his constantly cycling mind. I put it off to the stress of prison life; to the on and off abuse of illicit drugs; or even on the physical discomfort resulting from his liver issues or propensity for gathering random infections to his body. Never did mental illness present itself before me in my hunts to better know my brother through his own hand.
My letters to him were usually lengthy affairs. If they weren’t at least five pages, I didn’t consider them good enough though I knew he’d eagerly accept one paragraph per envelope as long as they just kept coming. He had a lot time to kill, to put it mildly; I figured time spent with me and the stories of my kids, husband, friends, and the hundreds of other everyday topics I peppered him with, could go a small distance to fill a portion of those hours and minutes. When I wrote, especially when my stream-of-consciousness sent me meandering here, there, and everywhere, it was as if we were together, chatting in person in a manner which has yet to happen in our very real physical lives.
Not even as kids was I able to step into an intimate sisterly discourse with him the way I could in my writing. The very act transported us both to the double rocking chairs on the back porch of my hopeful mind. Ice cold beers or lemonade in hand. Nowhere to be but with one another. Taking in the occasional child who might run in to the scene. Perhaps Gary jammin’ with my husband on the guitar they picked out together when he was released from Pleasant Valley State Prison. Or admiring the dancing clouds in the wide open sky overhead in companionable silence; his eyes tracking the birds in flight, drawing parallels between their freedom and his. This was my safe place of connection.
The computer greatly enhanced my ability to fill line after line with everything fit to print, and then some. Unlike Gary, my hands had the chance to keep up with my mind. I loved the fact that I could hunt down information for him with the click of the mouse and the flip of a browser all in one place. I was able to cut n’ paste to my heart’s content. If I purchased a package for him online, rest assured that the detailed invoice of every pair of slippers, summer sausage and Snicker’s bar ordered was going to print right behind my letter. Any bit of paper I could add to an outgoing envelope, any item of interest, any picture, any quote or Word-of-the-Day – I considered it tinder to feed the ever diminishing spark in his soul. I’d been known to heft the filled envelope in one hand, seconds away from sealing it shut, debating whether or not it contained enough. If it was found wanting, I’d hurriedly rummage through my e-mails or scan headlines in the paper or dig through the photo archives for that for the one extra thing which would make it complete. It had to be complete because my letters were all on a single-minded mission. They spoke of the life out here which was not forgetting him. My entire reason for being in those mailed missives was to keep him tightly knitted into the fabric of an existence beyond the dull gray and brown walls of incarceration.
I spent early mornings, up before the sun and family, hunched over the keyboard, getting in my hour or two with Gary. Still in my nightgown. If an afternoon presented an opening, I’d step in and hammer out an update on the garden – he recently admitted that doesn’t particularly interest him – or regale him with a tale of one, two, or three children. He was so much a part of my thoughts each day. On walks with our dog, I’d form paragraphs in my head, describing colors and textures on homes and in yards and within tree-lined meadows. On drives to the grocery store, I’d render an image of the sights and sounds of the mundane taken-for-granted taking place all around me. And outside of the pen and keyboard, not conveyed by Hallmark or Georgia font size 12, were the countless ‘good mornings’ and ‘good nights’ to him as I began and ended my days. The anchors holding him in the realm of the remembered. Me, sending out into the vast universe of the unspoken thoughts of billions, my personal reminders that he was not, and would never be, forgotten.
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