Blood Brothers

At 15 I discovered what silence meant. I wrapped myself in the absence of my brother’s voice and let it smother me. I was 18 before I remembered that I had something to say. I press ink to paper the way first graders press their bleeding palms together. I make blood brothers of irony and metaphor and they work in their garages on the weekends building truths to race across my hometown and your hometown and all the places in America where kids have skinned their knees on the pavement trying to fly. My mother marked my growth in band-aids, because every time I bled, I got taller, but I will never have enough of the world in my blood to be “grown.” Writing is like yelling into the Grand Canyon and having the world reply, “Yes, we hear you. We understand.” It isn’t easy, throwing your heart across the darkness, but there is always the smallest echo of someone grateful for the pulse. I write because the vibration breaks apart my bones, like the bars of Mandela’s jail cell, flooding me with peace. Nothing ever came from holding that peace, so I stopped holding my tongue. I’m tone deaf, but I’m singing through the lungs of every college kid writing postcards to their parents from a bottle of rum: “Wish you were here, Mom. I wish you were here with your band-aids and your smile.” The first letters I ever read were on an exit sign, and ever since, I’ve been writing letters to the outside asking, “How’s the weather?” I’m still waiting for a reply of more than just “fine.” I’m writing because I want to stop lying to my mother when she calls me up and she knows as well as I do that not everything is fine, but at the same time, I’m up every night writing birthday cards until my fingers bleed. I suppose I have an eye for silver linings. It’s like tripping balls in a bathroom, and even the white linoleum looks holy when it starts to move, so I’ve been running for the home I wrote about in a travel notebook when I was 7, the one I could never quite find on a map. I think I only ever found it in that notebook, but some places are like that. I write because people deserve to know about the girl who lost her virginity and her mind back in ’79, who grabbed a guitar and ran to LOVE Park in Philadelphia where she married her voice and they’ve been happy together for 34 years. They deserve to know about the teacher with 2 kids, 4 jobs and still enough time in his day to bring coffee to a 17 year old girl who’s trying not to think about the vicodin in her backpack and the vodka in her kitchen and her brother found dead hanging by his bed linens. They deserve to know that the soil is made of love and madness and that you could grow gardens in it, up to the sky, that gospel music isn’t pure, but it’s the muddy low-lights that give it depth. They deserve to know that there’s someone else out there asking the same questions they’re asking, like, “How’s the weather?” and “What was your mother like?” and “Listen. Do you hear that music?” Inject me into your veins, love. You’re already a reflection in my blood. So I’m standing here with open hands, connected to you, whose connected to him by links of paper signed by people I’ve never met to carry on here in time come after death. The moment you tell me about your fingerprints, I’m already reaching for a pen to write the lyrics to a love song about the places on the subway where my hands rested 2 years after yours. We haven’t come home yet. I’m trying to trace us a map, but “Human” is hard to find. I’m still looking, love, and I won’t stop until every living notebook is filled up.