I didn't ever get letters, and I wasn't sure I wanted this one. I had been living in New York City for several years, and had moved here right after I turned eighteen. I wanted to be out of the country and live somewhere, where I at least had a chance at making something of myself. Life in the country scared me sometimes, it was very monotonous and boring, so I tended to try and make it more fun. Well when I turned eighteen I made the decision to make something of myself, in a big city, THE big city.
Before I had left, I had a friend, more like a brother. We had been raised practically together, and did everything together. We had gone through everything together and shared more experiences than any two other friends dare discover. It had angered me that he didn't want to leave with me, we were meant to stay together, and when he didn't leave it angered me.
So, now that I found myself on a midnight plane out of New York, I was surprised. I hadn't been home in three years and didn't want to go home for this type of a reunion. I missed him it was true, and I owed it to him to show up at least one more time if could. Sitting on the plane waiting for it to take off was a completely new experience to me, I had never flown. Sitting in the middle of a three seat row, I didn't fill like being brave enough to take the window seat, but wanted to sit away from the majority of the traffic. The plane was about to take off, when there was a gentle hand on my shoulder and I turned to look up into an elderly ladies face. She was smiling and asked me if she could slide by me to sit in the window seat. I graciously twisted my body to let her slide into her seat.
"Thank you sweetie." She said gently. Her hair was a dark grey and pulled back into a tight bun on her head. Her skin was dark, and ridged. Her hands were smooth but wrinkled and she moved them with an ease that most elderly didn't have. However her eyes betrayed her age, they were gray and rimmed with a smoky haze. I could imagine them having been penetrating silver at one point in her life but now they showed marks of seeing a long life.
The plane took off and it wasn't as bad I thought it would be. I did let a good deep breath go when we settled from the steady climb. I was nervous but not as bad as I thought as I would be. It was only a few hours from New York to my home town, by plane so it would all be over in no time anyway.
"So tell me baby, how did you end up on this plane?" Her voice had a slight age to it, with an accent I could exactly pick up. It was country, maybe a southern woman.
"Well, I'm going home." I said not knowing exactly how much to tell this woman.
"That is a good thing, always a good thing. What is it that brings you back?" She asked.
"I got a letter from an old friend."
"Old? You can't even be shaving yet, you're still a youngin'" She laughed.
"Yea, I guess. I'm twenty one, but when you grow up with someone and live your lives practically inseparable, three years seems like a long time."
"Well, any time apart from a true friend, is no good time. How close were you boys?" She smiled, relentlessly.
I laughed at the thought and pulled a colored photograph out of my shirt pocket. It was about ten years old and rather beat up. I passed it to her and she smiled as she looked down at it.
I remembered as I told her.
We were eleven and standing in front of my house. My mother had insisted on taking this picture. We were laughing and I had my arm across his shoulder, I was taller. He was only a few inches shorter and his blonde hair was spiked up so that it came to the top of my head. My own brown hair hung shaggily across my face, not to long but long enough that my mother constantly hounded me to get a haircut.
His smiled played wonderfully against his blue eyes, and my own green eyes focused intently on the camera. My mother had called us her angel twins, because our eyes were so bright and colorful. As we were standing waiting for her to take the picture, we stopped and looked over her shoulder and asked her to stop.
"Hey Eric! Come take the picture with us!" I had seen his little brother and wanted him to join us; he was part of our gang and did everything we did. At that time we treated him just like another friend.
"You sure, Jackie?" He asked tentatively. I nodded and looked to my left. "You don't mind do you Brian?"
"No! Come on bro!" He smiled the most genial smile. His relationship with his brother was only rivaled with his relationship with me and even then we all three fit together like Macaroni and Cheese.
So we took that picture with me, one arm around Brian, and the other hand placed on Eric's shoulder.
"Cheese!" We were all in unison and broke into giggle fits before the picture was finished. The three of us ran off after that, heading toward the Slick Rock Holler, which we usually played at. It was back in the woods between our houses and was a gorge filled with moss covered rocks that could end you up in a pool of the coldest mountain water that you ever felt. We usually had plenty of fun pretending in that area, playing our own versions of Cops and Robbers or what not. On the hottest summer days we didn't half mind ending up in that pool.
When we were that young we didn't ever think twice about hanging out, just the three of us. It changed as we got older, regrettably. Eric was only a few years younger than us nine, to our eleven. But when we hit eighth grade and turned into teenagers, we decided boldly that he couldn't hang out with us anymore. We tried our best to keep our relationship with him a happy one, but we moved on to bigger and better friends. We soon became the leaders of our own little gang.
"Well that does sound like a lot of fun. Too bad for little, Eric was it?" The old black woman had listened to my story intently, and smiled when I took the picture from her and slid it back into my pocket after stealing one more glance at it.
"Yea, Eric. I think I regret that more and more as I got older. He was such the perfect younger brother, and they both had grown up with me so they were brothers."
"I'm glad you see it like that." She chuckled. I didn't understand her comment, but I felt like telling her more if she would listen. "So what was this little gang about? Terrorizing the local playgrounds were you?"
I laughed as she answered my silent prayer to speak.
Gang may have not been the most adequate term for what we were. We were four in number and we hung out when we could, doing what we could. It was an interesting experience to have more people to hang out with and we last as friend all the way through our junior year. We all started driving and began dating. Well they did, I didn't, and I had no interest. Emily and James were two that joined Brian and me. Emily was shorter than me too, but smart. She could outwit the best of us at any given moment. James was a jock who never seemed to fit in with the other sporty type guys, so we gained him. We also lost him.
He was driving home from Prom, and had already dropped off Emily. They weren't together but they wanted to go together, so they did. Well he was driving home, and was about a mile from his place when he was T-boned by another drunken student. It was the worst tragedy that had happened to my town in the over twenty years. His death marked the beginning of a strange depression around town. Everything changed, kids weren't allowed to play like we were and they didn't go and just do the way we did. It all became dangerous and parents didn't want to lose another precious child. I couldn't take it, Emily, Brian and I had become closer than ever, and I brought up moving away. I thought for awhile Emily might have wanted to, but Brian just didn't. I never understood why, but he didn't. So I left. Emily Stayed, and Brian and I didn't talk again.
"And you're jumping on a plane to go down there to see him after three years because you miss him." She smiled.
"Not really. I told you I got a letter from a very good friend. It wasn't from Brian; it was from his brother Eric. We were really good friends, when I said I wasn't interested in dating it wasn't because I didn't want to, it's because I knew who I wanted to date. Eric and I had talked about sexuality once, is this uncomfortable for you?" I said nervously.
"No sir, you talk all you need to, baby. I am here to listen." She gave that honest smile again and tension melted from my shoulders.
"Well I thought that when we talked about it, we were about to have some perfect storybook ending relationship where we would just admit how we felt. But he was too anxious about talking about it and I didn't want to press him into say something he would regret."
"That was mighty strong of you!" She said.
"Well yea, but that's part of the reason I wanted to leave, I never told anyone my feelings and I wanted to get away, somewhere I could be myself."
"That's always a good thing, but not at the expense of your truths." She said.
I smiled, she was right. I had moved away for my own sake and risked lying to everyone that mattered to me. I would have to try and fix that while I was here.
"And you don't know why Brian didn't want to move with you?" She smiled as the question sank in. I did know, or at least I thought I did.
"Well, as we were growing up we were close, and we did stay close but never the same way after our sophomore summer."
It was one summer when Emily and James had gone off to some summer camp, and Brian and I were left once again to our own devices. We played so much, going to the ball park and other fields where we would just kick a soccer ball around or something. Neither of us ever cared for sports that much but we did like to play around with various athletic things. We also loved biking, and hiking, keeping mostly to the trails and woods that led through our back yards.
One rather warm summer day we were hanging out at the Slick Rock Holler and baking as we just sat and talked. That was something we both had in common, we loved to talk, especially to each other. The sun was beginning to beat us down so we decided to stick our feet into the cold pool that we so loved. It felt glorious but it wasn't enough to counter the heat. Before I knew it Brian was standing and stripping his shirt off. I know that I was staring in shock and my face couldn't contort much more, but then he slowly undid his pants and dropped them by his shirt. Turning his slid his underwear down to and placed them there. He stood with his back to me and I gaped, my best friend, my brother had undressed himself so easily in front of me. Of course we had seen each other naked several times but not so much since we had both hit puberty. We had both grown taller and lost every bit of baby fat.
He had a firm tan rear, which made me think that he had to tan naked a lot. Questions rose to my head, things that I didn't know about him seemed to present themselves in abundance. He walked swiftly to the pool and jumped into one of the few places that he wouldn't hit bottom. I was still gapping as his blond hair broke the surface, and he stared at me in defiance.
"Not going to join me?" My head spun as his question entered my thoughts. I wanted to, but it was a boundary that I thought we had set up long ago, and never even thought of crossing. I stood and robotically pulled my shirt over my head and dropped my shorts. It never even registered to me to be ashamed of our nudity, or to turn around to conceal mine. I wasn't embarrassed by anything I had and only kept my thoughts at bay by my pure shock of what we were doing.
I waded out into the pool and dove under so that the coldness wasn't utter pain any longer. As I surfaced I lost sight of Brian, he had dove under and I was floating to deep to be able to see him. I felt him and kicked harshly as he dragged me under. My foot collided with him and pushed him as he dragged me down. We were both submerged and tussling rolling through the water in a mock fight. The water was blissfully refreshing and I forgot the strangeness of our naked bodies being so close. As the fight ended I floated to the other end of the pool and rested in one of the seat like rocks that lined the shallow end. The light glinted off the water as it became still, and Brian rested on the other end of the pool.
"What do you think about love?" The most bizarre question, and yet I will never forgot the conversation or the events that followed.
"Well, I think that there is no such thing as `true love' but there are soul mates, people that follow you because your souls are tied together." I had said to him.
"Yea, that's a good way to put it. What about brotherly love? Can it become something different?" I thought that I knew where he was going in that moment, but I decided to entertain the question.
"Same thing I suppose. It can if it's between the right people." My eyes were closed and I never heard him as he crossed the pool in silence. So it surprised me as he spoke so close to me.
"Can we be the right people?" He asked gently.
"Huh?" It was the only thing that I could think to say. And speech left me even quicker when he swam up in front of me, between my legs so that he was perfectly above me floating in the water. He leaned forward and kissed me, my first and most powerful kiss. One of love that was pure and yet, not true.
I wiped a tear away from my eye as I finished the story. Remember had never been so painful and yet I had began to realize so many things since this woman had first asked me questions. She smiled at me and placed a hand on mine, as she let the story sink in, not only for her but for me too.
"Is that all you did was kiss?" She asked slyly.
"Do you want those details too?" I chuckled.
"No, you can keep those to yourself." She smiled. "Well why is that a reason not to come with you?" She asked.
"Well, that was the beginning of a whirl wind semi relationship, the times we got together after that were spent exploring the amount of `love' we could have for each other. It was when Emily came back from the summer that his expression changed. He became distant, but still hung out with me. It was an awkward situation." I said thoughtfully.
"What did Emily have to do with it?" The old black woman looked stunned.
"She had been crushing on Brian for awhile and he never showed any interest in her. When she came back however, he told me that he didn't want to `sin' anymore and started hanging out with her the way we used to. He didn't ignore me or anything but he didn't treat me with the same love...or lust." I said.
"Ahh, I see. Well let me tell you God ain't never going to hate you for lovin' no one, man or woman." She said with a smile and another pat.
"Well he didn't see it like that. I think that is the reason he didn't want to move with me. He still saw me as a `sin' both by myself and for him." I said
"So why is he want to meet up with you again after three years?" She asked.
"He doesn't." I said as I pulled an envelope from my pocket. A tear hit it as I passed it to her. "You can read this."
Dear Jack,
I pray that this letter finds you in time. I want you to be here, I think that you need to be here. I have written to tell you that Brian has, how do I saw this, passed away. I must have started this letter three or four times and it comes no better any time. I know that you were his best friend once and you have a place here that needs to be filled. You meant something to him, and since the day you left, he regretted never talking to you.
We were friends and I use this in the hope that you will at least think about coming home. I beg you and want you to be here, for me, for him. I can only tell you that the funeral is in four days from the day that this letter is postmarked, so if you can make it please do. I know that that is a small hope, seeing as it will probably take that long to get this letter to you.
If you want to come home regardless you would be welcomed, I have missed you. Your parents, I know you have talked to, but would love to have you home. So much has changed, and I miss the old days, any amount of that I could have back would be a comfort. I know that you may not want to come back just for me, but there are others here that could use your help as well. Emily for one misses you as well, none of us blames you for leaving and we are happy that you have done so well. Please.
Yours Truly,
Eric
"Yes, this is certainly a good reason to go home. I am glad that you still have time." She said softly.
"Yea, I'm still not sure why I am going home, it scares me. There is something about this letter that pulled at me. I must still have the brotherly love for Eric, like I want to be there for him." I said staring at my hands. She passed me back the letter and I put it in the same pocket as the picture.
"He will appreciate it and you may also find that which you lost." She smiled, and her aged black face lined with wrinkles, showed what pure happiness could be.
As I was getting off the plane I couldn't see the black woman through the crowd, and I realized that she had left a small bag in the seat from which she was sitting. I grabbed it and tracked down a stewardess, asking if she had seen the black woman that I was sitting with. She smiled and shook her head, telling me that there was no black woman in my row.
"No one? That's not right." I said slowly. She checked a piece of paper that she had marked which seats were taken and which were not.
"Yes sir, there was no one in your row." She said slowly, looking at me nervously.
"Right. I must be thinking about the row in front of me I'm sorry." I smiled trying not to sound crazy. I left the plane and the airport opening the bag as I was driving my rental down the road that ran through fields and trees. A silver chain fell into my hand with a semi-ornate cross hanging from it, and a piece of folded paper.
"I hope you find what you lost, suga'. Yours forever." That was all that the note said and I folded it, dangling the chain in front of me. It was a very nice necklace and I put it on, as I was driving down the road. I did not know who she was and had a feeling that I would meet her again in one way or another. The cross hung lightly on my chest and eased a nervousness that had settled there earlier.
The funeral was the next day and I went dressed in a long sleeved black shirt and a pair of slacks. Fancier then I would have ever dared dress in my youth, but I had changed. My facial hair which made me look several years older I had almost shaved, but decided just to trim it. The line was long and I arrived to be about half way through it. I left it and began to mingle not sure I wanted to go to the front of it yet. Eventually I did, and I saw his face so quiet and peaceful. He looked happy at least.
"Jackie?" I looked around as my name came across the room. A young man, possibly `boy', came striding toward me, gleaming. His hair was a dark dirty blonde, but his eyes were a dark crystal blue. I would have thought that he had stolen them from the man lying forever sleeping, only a few feet away. Had I not known him in the past, I would have said he was his brother. In reality, only in miniature, he had the same sweet smile and sparkle in his eye that had always entertained me growing up.
"It is you!" He leapt up and wrapped his arms around my neck. After our embrace broke he drug me over to the consoling line and pushed me up to a woman that I was not sure that I recognized. Her hair was long and dark but her smile was unforgettable.
"Emily!" I said joyously.
"That's right I forgot that you knew Brian's wife."
"Wife?!" I said in surprise.
"Yea, we got married shortly after you left." She said sweetly, tears in her eyes.
I talked to her for a few minutes before I was shuffled out of the way by the rest of the town and went off with Eric. We talked for so long that the crowd had died and left before we realized what time it was. We left together, our conversation never ceasing, and I didn't want to leave him. He had talked like he hadn't told anyone anything in so long. It was dark when we ended up at the Slick Rock Holler.
We sat on the rocks by the moonlight talking, and he had begun to talk about his brother's death and the things that he had known about his brother.
"It was painful, he had an irregular heartbeat, they said it really shouldn't have killed him, the doctors tried to explain it like his heart had split in two directions. Forcing it to pump to hard and trying to over compensate. He died with his heart split in two."
"Wow, I've never even heard that." I said as he sat next to me. I pulled him close to me and placed my arm around his shoulder.
"You know he never talked about this place to me. But I know what it was like for him to come here." I jumped as he said this, what exactly did he know.
"Really, and what was it like for him?"
"His journals...they were always pure bliss when he talked about this place and the two of you here. I think he loved this place as much as he loved you." He said.
"What did it say about me in there?" I asked wearily, unsure if I wanted the answer.
"Everything, I guess. He talked about...well...everything." There was something in his voice that made me think that he knew, and there was enough of Brian in him that I didn't care. It was something I had wrestled with in the past, he was the perfect combination of the passion in Brian and the strength that made him Eric, and I wanted to be his love. I didn't understand it but being here with him after years, felt right. I was meant to be here, and she had helped me. I owed one to her...whoever it was. I chuckled out loud as this thought crossed through my head. Eric looked at me in surprise and I smiled back at him with such a grin that I hoped he would pick up on what I was feeling.
"Jackie..." I hadn't heard that name in so long, and coming from his lips it felt like a warm beam of sunlight.
"Eric..." I returned his gaze and his smooth name.
The most picture perfect cinematic moment flowed over us as we leaned forward and kissed each other gently on the lips. It was that moment that an owl hooted loudly from nearby and we both jumped laughing.
"I've waited so long..." He began. I put a finger to his lips and pulled him into a tight hug, kissing his forehead.
Thanks for reading my story I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to email me and let me know your thoughts. I LOVE emails...
Jbark217@Gmail.com
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