I Hate You. Please Don't Die In A Fire.

A Letter To An Estranged Brother

Dear Jack,

I hate you. But I wish for you not to die in a fire.

I’ve been watching the fire maps, scrolling through photo after photo of charred neighborhoods and burning buildings. The fire has come close enough to where you lived the last time that I needed your address. I just saw a video of people evacuating your neighborhood last week. The news said that the fire is mostly contained, but that there’s a warning of wind and ash. Surely you would have evacuated when things were at its worst, but I’m guessing that your area almost got burned, but did not, since that particular fire was the smallest and is now contained. I can’t find news of it anyway.

You’re lucky that way, always have been. It’s the curious kind of luck that helps you escape with your own life disaster after disaster, but that you will downplay, because you do not value your life.

If this was a movie, here would be our chance to reconcile. I would call you and say, “This is stupid. I’m worried. Life is short. I miss you.”

It would all be true.

Except.

I can’t do that, because you have not changed, and to go back to a relationship with you would mean I would have to accept the old rules of engagement. So I choose me, and the easier-to-manage rules of estrangement.

It appears that I have enough energy to scour news stories and fire maps to make sure you remain unharmed, but not enough to actually engage with you, which would involve calling you up and asking. This realizations depresses me, but not in a way that would motivate contact.

I heard about your health problems from a mutual friend. They asked me what had happened, and I had to answer that I had no idea, because you haven’t spoken to me for a year.

What did I feel? God, was it embarrassment that I didn’t know? Fear and worry about your health? Guilt over the things I said after you took someone else’s side over me, again, without hearing me, and abruptly cut me off, again? Did I feel..sadness? Grief?

Or shame, that it will ultimately not change anything for us?

I felt…worried. Sad. Hoping that you pull through.

Once, you were my favorite.

Now, I wonder, was that because you really were good to me, or if you looked kind in comparison to the others.

There’s our apocryphal tale, the story you tell when you’re showing how much the others hated me.

We were at a Howard Johnson’s in Anaheim, near Disneyland, and our parents were out, god knows where. They left me, a one-year-old, with you, Mervyn, and Tiffany. They went out to party and left a baby with three children under ten. So the story goes, I came down with food poisoning, something that caused me to be very sick from both ends, all over the room. It wasn’t until I had Baby Tiny that I realized that your story contained more horror at how my sickness inconvenienced and horrified your senses than it did concern over a small child’s health.

I remember when Baby Tiny was the same age, and she got some sort of flu. My entire nervous system was lit up like the Sunset Strip in Vegas worrying about that little human, who learned to barf before she could talk. I slept thinly and fitfully with her next to me on a towel, deliberately avoiding deep sleep so I could jackknife awake and make sure she wasn’t puking while on her back. My baby would not die the same tragic death that befell Janis, and Jim, and Jesse’s poor girlfriend in the show Breaking Bad.

Is that how you felt about me that night when I was the sick baby? Or were you like Walter White, imagining yourself deliberately turning me into a position where I’d asphyxiate?

Readers will be horrified, but they understand how I can’t put anything past any of you. They also don’t have to know that you would hate the metaphor, not because of any objection to being compared to a tv villain, but because you didn’t watch Breaking Bad and would probably say something snotty about not having time to watch television.

So, by way of squaring up, I’m grateful that you didn’t turn me on my back when I was a small, puking child in your care, and that you kept me alive, if only to repeat the colorful tale of your heroism.

If I haven’t said it more clearly: thank you. From what you say, I may not have been so lucky if you weren’t there and it had only been Mervyn, who kept jabbering, “what are we gonna doooo?” and Jill, who pretended to sleep.

And now, as the Santa Ana winds that blow through Anaheim meet with flames and burn down LA, a place we both lived when we briefly felt familial, I think about what it would be like to call you.

“Hey,” I’d say, “I’ve been thinking about you, and watching the devastation and hoping you were alright.”

“Oh,” you would say, in an offhand tone, “yeah, they told us to evacuate, then not to evacuate, then do it again, then they…” (You would go through a bunch of details about mixed municipal messages, managing to make it sound like Who’s On First? )

Then you would say something about how it wasn’t affecting you anymore and that you’ve really been focused on work. I would feel relieved that you were ok, but vaguely disgusted at your lack of awareness of your surroundings and your privilege within that structure. Maybe you would throw in a story about someone you know whose home burned down. I would listen to you and wonder if you really cared about that person or if you were trying to look like a good person in your own, or my eyes.

Or maybe you would tell me a harrowing story about rescuing all of the old women and dogs in your complex and then getting sick with inhalation. And how things were absolutely horrific, but you absolutely did not want to take me up on my offer to house you and the dog for a bit while you figure things out. But you would thank me anyway.

I would remember that you never texted back after you knew I was in the hospital after a head-on car crash. I would think about how you like to minimize my pain while describing yours.

Photo by Jessica Christian on Unsplash

I would feel like I was a good person, for calling you to check in, to have a brother I can call and check in with. But I would also feel vaguely disappointed in myself for engaging in a relationship that felt lopsided—one where you could dish it out but not take it, one where I called you to listen and you called me to talk.

I have always wanted a reciprocal, adult relationship where we could rely on each other, and I could offer for you to stay and you would take me up on it and we would get along and have a great time despite catastrophe.

But, there’s the tricky bit that goes along with self-discovery and healing: the more I learned to care for and respect myself, the less I came to respect you, your words, and your actions.

It is those actions that have left me feeling heartbroken and betrayed. Because, I am your sister and I love you.

I do not enjoy the family trait of humorous indifference. It suffocates and creeps, like the blanket of smoke and fire that is crawling north.

The indifference that our father taught us to cast towards everything that matters: morals, depth, emotions, and truth— is not normal. Love is normal. Hate is even normal. They are strong feelings provoked by strong connections.

That’s also why I hate you: hate is the other side of love’s coin, is it not? I would rather feel the pain of my hate towards you than the numbness of indifference. Ultimately, I know that you are indifferent to me because you are indifferent towards yourself.

Sadly, I must leave you to it.

My heartbreak will now shift her focus toward the city we once shared, Los Angeles, the mountains, the trees, the magnificent, weird buildings. The people—not the parasites who came to feast on some idea of what the city could do for them—but the true Angelenos, the ones who knew it is a place and not an idea, and that place is home. My heart breaks for them.

Not really so much you, not as much as it used to, back in the days before the empathy got wrung out.

Yet I have enough empathy to say, I don’t want Giacomo Jr. to die in a fire, and sincerely mean it. Which is more of a victory for me—I mean—sure, it’s great for you that you are not dying in a fire! it’s great for me on a basic human level, but also, it reminds me that I can feel things on a basic human level. The trauma caused by being in a family with you—and Jill, Mervyn, Carla, and Peggy Sue—plus the trauma we all suffered from our parents, sometimes has me wondering if I am indeed a normal person, the sort who declines to wish my enemies death by fires.

So maybe I’m more like you than I care to admit, and by this public reassurance that I have a base level of human feeling towards a sibling that I am doing the equivalent of your bragging about your friend losing a home in my imaginary scenario.

That is also a family trait that I have come to recognize, something I have come to see as a tell, a tell that wouldn’t necessarily register to an outsider or even an in-law. Or maybe it’t the most transparent thing about us. We like to present ourselves as caring beings, especially when we are trying to escape our own dark resentments and vengeful thoughts.

Something has shifted; and I’d rather show my petty ass in public than pretend to be a more enlightened person than I truly am.

It’s important to feel like one is a good person, if only that it keeps one making just and ethical decisions.

Anyway, I won’t call you. I won’t write you. I will stop texting angrily, because I know that it’s immature and shitty of me, but I was so mad before that I didn’t care, but now that you are dealing with such awful conditions, I won’t add to them with my rage. I will stay heartbroken, because I have a heart. I will stay away from you, because I have a brain.

But I love you. And hate you. And hope you don’t die in a fire.