Magicians and Men.

Listen. I have a secret I want to share with you.

My brother is The Magician. He can pull quarters from thin air, and let them drop into your palm so you have enough to buy that extra large espresso.
He can make the chains around your iron case vanish in a cloud of smoke, leaving you free to stand beside him.
He can juggle words, and give you horns, and make music flow from a metal box.
And he can swallow swords and breathe blue fire, and walk barefoot on broken glass.
Thing is, once you see the canvas of my brother’s soul, you know color.
But for all his tricks and miracles, he’s disappeared a couple times.

I was twelve, and it wasn’t about me—
It was about you, gone, two hundred miles out of childhood and moving not upward, but around, dancing tribal circles somewhere in the middle.
Drinking wine from someone’s lips, sliding razors across your wrists. Sleeping in the cemeteries, stealing people’s rosaries.
Living life right, like the boy who woke up dead, and nothing in the mortal world could stop him.

This is probably where the problem starts: You were destined for romance. I remember—those foul-mouthed girlfriends with their dyed black hair, their tiny lip rings, the sweet roundness of their dead-white cheeks. Like spider women, they spun you round and round in their rotten candy webs, swallowed you up and showed you a world that couldn’t yet exist for me.

I didn’t know it then, but I finally get it now. You left, and all I had wanted in my youth was to sit at your feet, listening while your stories from life and the road and the world wound my head tight with ideas, created doorways and escape routes to a more mystical existence.

But while you were gone, the house lost its heat, its breath—Mom and Dad took their places at their rockers, back and forth, back and forth in front of the television, the snow piling up around us because no one had the heart to shovel, until years had gone by.
Until the doorbell rang and there you stood, with a family, and we all looked up, surprised, to find the time had passed.

I remained a little girl for so much longer than a little girl should. My body stayed small because I made it—my bedroom stayed small, all Care Bears and Mermaids and Muppets, and for a long time my mind stayed small, because parents (who did not genuinely parent) put a pressure on me that they could never exert over you.
And when I was little, you and Brandon would sing to me,
“Don’t tell me truth hurts, little girl—‘Cause it hurts like Hell.”
But I never really believed you, or David Bowie, until I started to grow up.


I lost my lust for literature in between text books and lectures, and I thought it was over for me, that there was no further truth to be discovered. But you thrust “Neverwhere,” into my hands and lit the cigarette between my lips as you hummed, “Down in the Underground…”

You saved me as much as you could, even after you were gracefully relieved of your freedom by an angel who took karate. I say this with respect.
The gifts you could not give me in childhood, you brought to me later in life. My sister, my best friend, with a toughness I’ve never had and the kindness to try to teach it to me. My niece, my substitute daughter—the wise little thing who told me, so casually, in the throes of many breakups, “I thought you were going to marry David Bowie, anyway.” And my nephew, the little fart that makes my whole being collapse in gales of laughter when, in my voicemail box, I happen upon messages of a little boy singing, “I’m a DUCK, I’m aaa DUUUUCK, Quack, quack..—Mom, I’m tryin to sing to Lisa…”

But aside from them, you brought me yourself.
I can’t tell you how many times your voice has rescued me, when Mom and Dad could not shake off their parent roles long enough to be human.
You gave me hope. I could describe it for you with an image. 4th of July, you and Jen stood in the kitchen cooking steaks, singing along to "Once in a Lifetime" as you daughter danced a blue streak across the living room.
I knew life could have beauty.
In that moment, I knew.
So...
For all the inspiration, for all the borrowed music, and all the wild nights that are still cartwheeling around back there, somewhere behind us, back on Marvale Lane, waiting for your humble return…

I thank you.

When I find pieces of you in other people, I feel lucky. I never want to give them up.
I never want them to disappear.
I never want you to disappear.

Stick to pulling rabbits out of your hat, will you?

It’s love.

--by SleepUnwisely, Mars., 11/24/2008