11b.

Dear Mum,

black and white
You were driving over the harbour bridge, one week ago, boot filled with all the beekeeping equipment, probably shaking your head, muttering “stupid” whilst changing gears, uncertain if you were referring to the car in front of you that was unnecessarily slowing down, or dad, or yourself.

Sister and I were catching the train home over the bridge after a concert, 2017, talking, essentially we had figured you out. The next family dinner we each said something once every four minutes, testing if you wouldn’t tell us off/point out how quiet we were because our silence was less than five minutes. You even thanked me for contributing.

This is how I saw you. Brother, and then I, and gradually even sister, tiring of you playing the same songs on the same piano the same three nights every week. People, from a work conference, or auntys-in-law, or those you were seated next to at a wedding, they fall, sometimes before they had said even three words, into a ‘good’ bucket or a ‘bad’ well with little opportunity to get out. You stubbornly stick by the declaration “the better team is the team that won” no matter how much dad & I protest, no matter if the winning team scores two own goals and the losing team misses three open nets. You play your stories on repeat - the terror of being a passenger when your sister went for a joyride, dad lying about his degree when you first met, the road trip with your mum after you graduated, dad slowly stealing a garden for your tiny apartment out of the flowers of houses near his work, the obnoxious person you met at brother’s graduation who showed a picture of their eldest child’s fancy wedding, and of course, your dad and the dog and the TV and the crying.

I imagine you as unchanging, like the TV shows you taped and would watch, laughing closer and closer to the beginning of the joke with each re-watch.Dad absorbed in this too, a remote pressing certain buttons, you responding in certain ways, invariably. But other than dad, if nothing changes, you go as you always have.

Maybe that’s what family is, ourselves feeling like a living breathing person, but other people a piece of fiction, scraps of gossip trapped in a screen, stable, pause-able, off when we aren’t around.

Is that how you see me? Quiet? Withdrawn? Loving you less than you and dad love me? As if I’m disappearing further and further into a film, and you have less and less control as it unfolds? You probably know my tendency has been to hide the plot of my life from you. It’s because I thought I knew what you would do.

I realise this is not the most inspiring letter. Please keep reading, (I hope) it gets “better”.

colour
A story brother told me, also last week. When he was in year eight and the tallest bully in the year accused him of being a “wuss” daily because he was always crying at school. On the second week of this you took him to the beach. He swam, you got a coffee perhaps, he doesn’t really know what you were doing. When he ran back to the car, you asked if he wanted to keep swimming, and he said only if you swim too, and so you did. You were getting out of the water, and, in between complaints about your wet clothes and the toll roads, apparently, said you wished your father had cried more.

You eventually stopped playing the piano. The bee dream, the revenge narrative notwithstanding, is idyllic and expensive in a way you never are. Despite your distaste for my silence, you’re the person I’ve most watched TV with: thanks for staring at a screen with me. You never talk about all the unkind words dad’s mum has said about you, even though those words are somewhere on a shelf you cannot throw away. And you never told me about what you wished for your dad.

And you called me, whilst driving back across the bridge, deciding you wanted to tell dad what he did and what you did, even though you grumbled about paying the toll, and that you would have to return the items some other time, and that you didn’t necessarily need to not return the stuff in order to tell dad about it and maybe there was space to turn around again.

I’m sorry for lying to you about J., and for hiding it, really for hiding any decision I’ve made to alter my life in any meaningful way. And I’m sorry for all the times I ignored you because I thought I knew what you wanted, concluding you were trying to triangulate with me about someone else. Of course this is what you were doing sometimes, but, contrary to what sister and I accused you of on that train, this is not what you were always, even often doing.

I’m toying with this idea, (typically sister would have been the first person I screened something like this with, please be gentle with this un-curated thought), the idea of the ‘dust song.’ When you called me the other day, it was like listening to a song unplayed for years. And it is only when the music fills up your ears and your mind and your heart that you realise you were missing it, and then you place it on every playlist you make for the next three months, or perhaps you make those playlists just so you can listen to the song with as many backgrounds as possible.

Tell me more about how dad has managed to keep crossing into and out of the grey zone with you, how there is no one you are more upset with, angry at, or care for than dad. Tell me more about your dad: I realise now that when you speak of him you are guiding us to the reality you miss him, and maybe that you wish he was a slightly different person.

Don’t see this letter as me trying to fix something. Or even as me attempting to work out if I really know you. Maybe it’s me acknowledging we both are in colour, and that’s true even when we don’t know what all of those colours are. Ultimately, I guess I didn’t know if you knew brother was listening that day at the beach, know if any of us are ever listening.

I (and this somewhat undermines the point of the letter) do miss the sound of you playing piano. It’s definitely OK that you stopped. I suppose I hope the reason you stopped is not because of any of the three of us.