In Cages
originally read live 8/13/2024
We lived in a motel for five days before moving into the house my parents have been in for the past eleven years. There were six people in one room: my grandmother slept on the pullout loveseat, my parents took one of the beds, and I slept with my two siblings in the other, each night loudly proclaiming I was so tired of my brother’s newfound love for tangling his arms into a knot around my elbow, hanging onto my limbs and extremities all day every day, the way he’d repeat each of my sentences awed as if it were a commandment. Upon our arrival to the new house I spent the entire first day staring out the window waiting for kids to spill onto the street. When evening hit and children swarmed like mosquitoes, I sprinted out and met a group riding bikes. Ten minutes later my brother came to join me, dragging his feet down the driveway on my old pink and white training wheel bike and shouting my name. I was suddenly embarrassed and, so fed up with him from the days prior, I told my new acquaintances “That’s just Colin, let’s ride somewhere else.” We left him standing on the edge of a stranger’s lawn, staring with his blue eyes widened like an animal. I never made any effort to exclude my brother again but kids’ minds work in funny ways and so my house was already cemented as “Riley’s house.” Nobody was ever mean, but retrospectively we may not have been nice either and in my mind that might be worse.
When Colin turned five the only thing he wanted for his birthday was betta fish for each of us. I remember thinking it was so odd that he’d waste gifts on his sisters but I didn’t tell him because I liked the idea of a fish and deep down I knew this was probably the last birthday he wouldn’t be fully cognizant of the fact that he was doing that kind of thing, There was a certain grievable beauty in the fact that my little brother loved to share. So we walked around the whole petco just because we could, stopping at each animal, talking about the farms we’d own someday. The last animals we saw before the fish in the back were these lop eared rabbits, perfectly still against the metal bars of their enclosures. I’ve never known how to react to animals in cages–I get this sinking excitement that I still cannot place. I was ten, freshly aware of the severity of my own emotion–and so scared of it–so instead of confronting the rabbits, I watched Colin stare into the cage. He’s always looked more like me than my sister does, and I look like my father and every man in my family has the same blue eyes I wish I could have inherited, light enough to look watery–and I’m staring at him staring into the eyes of the closest rabbit when I realize he’s making the same face I do when I look at myself in the mirror.
At college I love to talk about my beautiful baby siblings who aren’t babies anymore but are still completely made of magic–every idea they’ve ever spoken is like watching someone pluck stars out of a summer night sky, the luck they find in the world cracks them like glow sticks and spills onto everything they touch. I’ve spent the past ten years attempting to preach this to any of my friends placed unfortunately close enough to listen. Sometimes I remember the way my brother looked at me during those days in the motel where we were cramped to each other’s side and realize that’s the way I look at him now, and I wonder if he still ever feels the same. All he did during those five days was love me and I couldn’t handle it. I wonder if that changed anything.
There was a weekend in early May where we both ended up planless at my parents’ house. He beat me at Mario three times in a row and grinned like the joker, wider every time. He doesn’t talk very much but he told me that night he thought he may be an extrovert and I looked at him and said “you’re lying.” He said “no I’m not, I just don’t have a lot of friends.”
I couldn’t help but feel the most intense pang of guilt, my inner monologue screaming into my soul that this could have been avoided. It was completely my fault. I don’t know if that’s true. All the neighbor kids have either grown up or moved away. Colin does activities and sports now where he has every opportunity. He’s made friends and lost them for one reason or another, but I can’t help but believe the fact that my love for my brother is boundless but my cruelty was bounding. It should have been Colin’s house, or at least ours.
There was a few month span–some of the last months I ever felt young enough to still play on the street–where every night the boy who lived two doors down would knock and ask for me. Whenever my dad answered, he would tell my friend that he’d let me know to come out and then yell into the street that Colin would be coming too. One evening when this happened, we were sitting in the kitchen waiting for the ramen water to boil. Colin heard the whole thing, and as my dad entered triumphantly, my baby brother looked at him and me, out the window onto the street, and with caged rabbit eyes wide open, he said “I don’t really want to anymore.”