May 7th, 2022
I spent most of my days in the northwest with my eldest brother Ted as a result of my parents contracting the coronavirus. The unfortunate circumstances of my job meant that I was always limited in the length of my visits, and I often had to ration myself amongst my siblings and my parents. It was a strange though I dare not say pleasing result that I was allotted more time with Ted, whom I have always desired to share in company, and whom I perceived shared this mutual comfort of conversation. With a regretful yearning poisoned by fear and hesitancy I would eventually see my mother and father, who both later recovered slowly but surely from the virus, but I'll speak of that another time.
Ted and I, be it through our heritage or shared upbringing, carried on ourselves similar dispositions, although the lore of the family always liked to cast me as the more stubborn and less agreeable of the two. Regardless, we tended to trade philosophies, though I admit that's being a little generous on my part. The reality was that growing up, Ted seemed to come to his revelations first, and these ideas would then trickle down to Andrew and I who, enamored with his words, would take authorship of them amongst our peers. I suppose this stream of belief was not unique to our relationship. After all, do we not all collect our thoughts from others, known and unknown into ourselves?
But perhaps now, detached from him in these latter years, I had some semblance of ideas of my own to share, and we often spent long nights rambling to each other in streams of conscious thought barely articulated and comprehensible and yet piercing deeply within each other's hearts. I speak only for myself of course. I can only hope that in age my words have had a fraction of the effect on Ted the way his words did on me.
On this occasion, spurned on by an interaction on the street, Ted and I trailed off into a discussion about the proper etiquette towards the homeless and eventually into the pitfalls of traditional morality in the context of western Christianity. I found myself shamefully eager that Sam was present to witness us in the midst of these conversations. Apart from the pride in my falsely perceived intellect which I confess is a hideous fault of mine (not to be confused with the "burden of intellect" itself, which would be a ridiculous thing for me to confess), I had a genuine desire for Sam to engage in our discussion or at the very least for Ted to interact with her more directly, such was my deep love and admiration for both of them. But of course, it was within the character of Sam that she paced behind us, quietly, attentively listening, and I was afraid to ask if she was deep in contemplation or slowly losing the thread of our incoherent conversation (I suppose it was a bit of both).
Surrounded by the luminous green of the late spring forest, densely packed in the cool, humid air of the northwest, I had a faint recollection of New York and the fringes of a memory so distant enough as to become indecipherable from a dream. The content of our dialogue was perhaps only meaningful to us at that point in time, and what might now still feel sharp in the torrential swirl of ideas in my contemporary mind will soon fade into obscurity and irrelevance; thoughts incapable of being recalled though they may still reside in me like lost volumes tucked away in the back rooms of a library. What will remain in bursts of lucid detail among other things will be the color green, the rapid trill of a speculated song sparrow darting among the enveloping branches, the company of those I loved amidst the gentle overture of spring mist, and beyond me, jpegs on a hard drive and places temporary.