Goodbye

Journal Entry: 5.25.09

It was our parting of ways at security check. The tears sneaked up on me. I fought them fearing that I would remind my brother of our mother, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“I love you,” I hugged him, clenched fists wrapped around his back. “I love who you are.”

Fumbling through baggage check, keys, a jacket, zip-lock of toiletries, neatly ripping shoes off. Alone. No more sister to play. Now I travel solo, longing to feel the swing of my brother’s long arms brushing at my side, showing me his Boston pace of life, mid-conversation, pointing.

Lunch: Pan-Asian cuisine on a Styrofoam plate, a flat Coke to sip. My table amid the cluster of the grand eating area where everything echoes inside a flurry of dialects. Hearing conversations, the tilt of a head, the jingle of a phone.

Aboard flight 1279. A window seat. The sensation of my brother’s reaching for me still fresh. The 60s age flight attendant wipes away her grey bangs, demonstrating exits and flotation devices with a weak smile. I am glad to hear mutual southern accents which will fly with me into Charlotte, and then eventually, on to Savannah, where an empty house, which wears a FOR SALE sign, waits for me.

I lift off, wondering if my brother watches me from his loft where he can see every mode of transportation leaving and entering the city, every beginning and every end.

“Goodbye,” I say to the patch of window behind my left shoulder which looks out upon my last view of the Boston sky line. I turn as far left as I can so the girl wearing dangly earrings seated beside me can’t make guesses about the reason for my tears. I am not leaving behind a love affair or seeing someone off to war. I am just sorry that my time with my brother is over; my little brother, no longer little, but a man; an architect who holds our memories of a complicated, younger time mutually in his hands.