Lauren and I hover near each other like betrayed lovers. As if our intimacy, turned dark and dangerous, is now over. And neither of us knows what to think. How to feel. I look away, at the crumbling walls of this long-forgotten building. She stares at the floor, anything not to see what I have done.
Like so many times before, when I feel the adrenaline seeping from my body, I try to find the innocence. I reach out for those moments of childhood that invoke the nostalgia I hear others speak of. I try to re-create some cliché of a relationship between me and my big brother. We’d run through the neighborhood, laughing and wrestling in the clover. We’d sit in the darkness watching a movie on the television, one that our father never would have allowed us to see. We’d whisper and conspire while playing cards for hours.
Those things aren’t real. They didn’t happen. I think they didn’t. But when I press, when I try to be sure, the images slip away like sand through my fingers. The memories behind me fade away. I try to focus on Drew’s face. He is on one knee before me, my shoelaces wrapped around his fingers. I look up at him and I feel something so real, so primal. Maybe it is something, as the older brother, he has never felt. He is just a boy, yet my eyes see him so differently. I see a force, something almost inhuman. I watch his every move and my fingers mimic without my knowing. I see the size of his hand compared to mine. I see his straight back and his thin smile. He speaks, telling me a story about a rabbit and a hole, and each word changes me, but not in any way he can know. I let his voice wrap around me and all I can do is wish that one day I can be as strong, as smart, as brave, as cool.
I have heard people say that they do not want to be a role model. That they never asked for someone to look up to them in awe. In those words, I have heard the fear of responsibility, the rawness of guilt. Maybe no one wants their every action scrutinized. No one wants to feel like they have to be perfect for someone else’s benefit. Their hesitancy means nothing, though. For they have no more choice in the matter than those looking up to them in the first place. No one chooses to be a role model. And no one chooses who their role model may be. Instead, people pass through our lives. Some like weather, changing things, sometimes turning things upside down, yet leaving nothing permanent behind, like they never existed. Others pass through like time, leaving nothing behind unchanged. For those, their presence, their influence, simply grows, merging with our souls, making us who we are, like words make up the past.
Why couldn’t it end there? Why couldn’t I just freeze time? I could sit on the forest floor, looking up at my big brother, worshipping him like an idol. His strength could mold me into the man I should have been. His caring could have guided me as a husband. His patience as a father. If only it had ended in that moment. If only one of us had died right then and there. Then, maybe, things would be different. Maybe not perfect, but better.