How do you string words together and slip them into the hands of a person you barely know or a brother you only meet eight, nine or barely a dozen times in your entire lifetime?
He is your father’s son. And at an early age you have already acknowledged that he is. From what started as something of an overheard conversation in your grandmother’s wake—in the days that follow, with your fourth grade sensibility, you begin to shape and reshape the idea that you have a brother, older than you by two years. The kind of brother that you will never share house with because he is from your father’s bachelor’s past. Then that moment when truth falls so naturally, so gently, arrived. Though it escapes you already on whether or not it was your father or an uncle’s words that validates his existence, it doesn’t matter because all along, you wished for an older brother who will make you slingshots and toys from timber and who will carry you on his shoulder when you cross the pea green river beyond the rice paddies to bring lunch to your father who tills the land on Saturdays. But he came into your range rather too late when, at that age, you can already do things on your own.
Then you meet him for the first time. And there is no denying that he is your father’s son. He seems to be plucked straight from your father’s yellowed university graduation portrait. And you begin to get envious because he is handsomest than any of you in the family. But more distinctly, he has the typical silence, the timidity, the temperance—the trademark of your father’s clan.
Year after year, he sits in one corner on a Good Friday afternoon. Year after year, in the background while the priest prepares for the mass, over the mic, somebody always mouths with a voice that cracks for good theatrics, the Seven Last Words of Christ. You want to approach him, your kuya and squeeze the space with the whole town which only go to church on a regular basis, three times a year—Christmas, New Year and Good Friday. But you, in the end, limit yourself to simple hand gestures and nod to acknowledge the presence of the unspoken, of a space between you, of a ken between brothers. Those were your last memories of him, ten or fifteen years ago. So, one day when your life, by far, takes one rewarding turn, you plan to invite him for a get-together. The date is indefinite. Anytime this year.
But just last week, at the onset of reunions and Christmas parties, he left. And the unsent dinner invitation will sit on top of your cabinet and gather dust. Until the paper turns yellow with age and the print fades with the distant past.
And you want to believe like most kids who console themselves when left with no definitive answer about their loved ones when they die; when you want to wax the glaring possibility of what-ifs; you want to believe—in the midst of grief, of a rainy Saturday afternoon in the middle of one of the twin lakes--that he is now one of the stars you see from the roof deck on a still, cloudless night.
for Kuya Obet who left just when September begins
