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9a.

sometime around the present

My right thumb hovers over the unsend option, wobbling from side to side as the right hand itself shakes. I place the phone in my pocket.

I blame the second coffee. I may have typed questions like that before, but I've never sent them.

I retrieve my phone. I stare at the screen until the unsend window elapses. I lock it, stand up, and commence pacing the room as the lightheadedness fades. Unlocking my phone, I question what my alternatives are: sending a message saying ‘sorry, wrong person haha’, or ‘forget I said it’, or ‘it is unclear to me why I sent this’, etc. The phone goes back in my pocket. Hoping she won’t reply doesn’t seem like a viable “strategy”. I throw my phone on the bed.

I step into the hallway. Only a few strides take me past the closed door of sister’s room and into brother’s room/dad’s office. I pull one of brother’s old speaker systems out of the pile, one that actually has a CD slot, alongside left and right speakers, multicoloured-cables, an old iPod dock, and the subwoofer. I form a cradle with my arms and carry everything. My elbow knocks an external hard drive to the floor. I bend my knees as I place the mess of components on the ground. I pick up the hard drive. Lightly dusting it, I feel masking tape on the underside. I turn it over. On the tape, written by brother: ‘2016-2017’. Maybe we all are just fragmented versions of one another?

I imagine another list.
‘Dear brother,
The reasons I might call you friend:

  • your laugh is genuine, if a little too easy to procure
  • you care about your work in a way I can only hope to
  • the way you would just sit behind me as I played games on our computer, back when they were not always multiplayer, back when the ratio of screens to people in our family was roughly 1:1, and maybe that was odd, but I miss it
  • you do equate sharing the truth with love, and the world would be a terrible place if no one lived with that equation
  • despite who I am, two weeks ago you and Joyce still took me out to a pub and told me you were trying to have a baby

I return the hard drive to its place.

I flip the powerpoint on, triggering a satisfying electronic click on the old machine. I press the eject button. Press again. The CD slot does not make itself available. I sigh. That’s OK. These speakers don’t have bluetooth or a headphone jack anyway.

I slide out the ‘2019’ box. The iPod lies in a bed of dust. Scrubbing the sheet of dust reveals faded buttons so worn they are indistinguishable from one another. I let my subconscious press the button. No power. Obviously. I place it in the dock.

I pace, the cry list in hand, asking the same questions I’ve already asked: Why is my name last? Does the tear mean anything? Why is the list about that particular moment in time? How much did sister know me? Does she know me?

I poke the iPod, shaking it in the dock. It shows me the red battery charging symbol.

J. said on several occasions it was weird that I’d never cried at a concert. I suppose that it is weird.

I glance at the iPod sitting in the dock, speculating if it will still remember all the songs it entered its rest with.

In our family sister worked out how to exist as a multitude of different shades of herself. I had lost the ability to be significant to anyone but her, and now even that... Was I not curious enough about the depth of my brother’s emotions? I didn’t know that the conflict between my parents was the way that it is, and maybe always will be. Do I even know when sister last cried? I guess the coffee knew where I wanted to get to before I did.

I hop to my desk.

Slide 6:
When would I have stopped calling you friend?

  • m…

In a corner of my room, text appears against the small white illuminated background of a screen. It still remembers.

As I position my headphones I think of my good pal saying I can’t always process my insecurities through music. I knock on sister’s door, re-creating a once-familiar sound. I hear the tumbler for the latch reset as I allow the door to close behind me. Standing in the middle of sister’s empty room, listening to the album J. gave me. This first track was always J.’s favourite song from it. I had never come around to it. In some sense, my opinion of this song was me substituting an easy question, “how mainstream, how complex is the band?” (too mainstream, too simple), in place of the harder question that was being asked of me, “can I ever truly love someone whose choices are different from my own?” (who knows the answer to that?). It’s this winding track about two mountains separated by a body of water, and the lyrics are written from the perspective of one of the mountains remembering a myth about a human throwing itself from the top of a mountain into the water to save another person. The closing two minutes are a plea from one mountain for the other mountain to move closer again and again and again. In hindsight, this is a pretty amazing breakup album.

My steps feel hesitant as I enter my room…

Slide 5:
Answer to the question ‘have you cried at a concert?’

  • mum: yes, but only once
  • dad: yes, but not as much as mum
  • brother: yes, obviously
  • Joyce: yes, but it was because my heart moved
  • sister: no
  • me: no

I place the cursor after the word 'no' and hit backspace.

the cry list • nine