I STILL DON’T know why I did it. I was upset about something Jay did to me. But I can’t remember what it was. Probably something small. But I had clearly decided to retaliate. With something big. So I waited patiently. For inspiration to come. Sitting quietly on the floor of the laundry room with revenge on my mind. I was seven. Jay was eleven.

Then I heard the upstairs shower turn on. And happened to notice a screwdriver with a translucent yellow handle next to the junk drawer. The same one Jay and I had bought our dad, together, for Father’s Day. But as I stared at the screwdriver now, evil came to me. Which is kind of odd because I clearly loved this person. A lot. My sweet big brother. He taught me to read when I was only four years old. He included me in playtime with his friends when he didn’t have to. But that screwdriver in my hand felt great. And something in me knew that I had to do something terrible with it.

So I marched up the seventeen shag-carpeted steps and down the hallway into our shared bathroom. I knew before I did what I did that, although Jay was a foot taller than me, he was standing in the sunken green tub and we would be eye to eye when the shit went down. I took a breath. I raised the screwdriver over my head. I gnarled my teeth. I loosened my throat in preparation for a guttural scream. And I reached for the shower curtain.

But then I stopped. I could see the immediate future. His terror. His potential retaliation against my retaliation. And I knew I couldn’t follow through with it. I loved the guy. This was wrong. So I decided to just make a fun joke out of it. I lowered the screwdriver and casually opened the curtain with a faint “ha ha” and a loose, offhanded swipe of the screwdriver. I smiled, knowing he’d appreciate the smart humor. This would bridge our gap. This would solve whatever conflict we had at the moment. Less retaliation and more…reaching out.

What happened next is still a bit of a blur. But I do remember Jay’s fragile, thin, hairless body slamming into the back of the shower, his face whiter than the subway tiles and his scream at a pitch level that, even though only half of its decibels were audible to the human ear, sent a lightning bolt up my spine and exploded my brain into stardust. I also remember seeing his emotions traveling quickly across his eyes. Fear, anger, and then (just before I turned and ran) hurt.

But I didn’t stay for anything more. I took the seventeen stairs four or five at a time, past my terrified mother, out the front door, down the block, and all the way to the Lake Pontchartrain levee. And I hid myself in “the woods” (really just a ten-foot area of foliage between the levee and the lake, but it felt like an entire forest at age seven).

I’m not sure how long I stayed out there. If I had to guess I would say it was about twenty minutes. But a lot changed within me during that time. I was processing what had just happened. I was coming to the age of reason in my life. I was feeling something big that I couldn’t put my finger on then but I now know was the innate desire for a young man to kill his God so he could be free. I remember feeling that I should not have done what I did to my awesome big brother but that I somehow needed to do it, and that I needed to stand by my actions and not apologize. Again, I couldn’t understand this at the time, but I was just beginning my struggle with how to simultaneously be with and worship my God and still be an individual who could grow and breathe in this world on his own two feet.

And I remember deciding that when I got back home, I was not going to apologize. I was going to walk in and take my punishment like a man. Surely my parents would side with Jay. He had been harmed, and I was the clear offender. But something in me said, “Do not apologize for this. This is what you had to do.”

So I marched back from the levee. I put my hand on the front door, steeling myself for the moment. And when I walked in, Jay was sitting on the couch, still undressed, hair wet, a towel wrapped around him like a boating accident survivor. My parents flanked him, arms around him, consoling him. He wasn’t crying anymore, but his face had the ground-beef vibe of post-traumatic tears to it. And he just looked at me. And so did my parents. They were either unsure what to say or somehow knew that the bond between me and Jay was beyond them, that they had no right to interfere in what was about to happen. That it was our moment and had very little if anything to do with them.

And as I looked at Jay, something interesting happened. The desire I had to stand my ground and let him know that, while the incident may have been unfortunate, I was my own man and was capable of killing my God whenever I wanted …that desire was equally met by my desire to be next to him. More than that. To be with him in that moment. To be conjoined. A single unit. To come back to church and worship my God again so we could be that special duo that we’d always been. The Boys. And I was paralyzed with indecision as to how to be and what to say. And the funny thing is that he wasn’t mad at me. He was just waiting to see what I would do. Patiently.

I think about that moment often. And whenever Jay does something that pisses me off or offends me, I think about how patient and loving he was to me then. How he let me do that to him without retaliation, somehow sensing that I needed to figure out where I stood with him. It plays like an eternal IOU in our relationship. And I try my best to let whatever is bothering me slide. Sometimes it works.