Threads of Memory
I crept between the flannelette sheets like it was the first time. These beautiful old things that I’d worn the edges into fraying.
Rose-printed plush with blooming lilac buds, olive foliage, and creamy-white fabric that looked worn right out of the box patiently submitted to my relentless picking. The picking that bled from an anxious mind.
When he fell unwell, Mum said it was a sickness that had caught his bones. Sometimes the body hurts too much to get better. That the cure hadn’t yet been found, there was nothing anyone could do — including me.
You cradled me the night of the day we lowered his undersized coffin into the dank ground.
When the white lilies stained my best dress as I tried to inhale them — and him — in.
When the unblemished carnations casually tapped on the 6-foot-under wood, the echo of a petite oak frame and the ever after.
When a snow-fresh butterfly neared and I swore to myself it was a sign you were okay.
When in one instant, my simple unpainted bouquet plummeted passed dirt and stones laid over millennia.
When I wished to fall in too.
The curves of the blossoms had once softened the hard edges of my nightmares. The foliage had quietly listened as I thrashed and bawled and spat curses at God and the Devil. The alabaster had absorbed the salty, angry remnants of grief-stricken tears that once threatened to drown me: to pull me under. Into that hole, bedside my younger brother.
But outside of their caress, a whisper of peace was hard to find.
The sheets moved with us. One of the few material possessions that progressed from before to after. To the new suburb, the next school, a fresh start. Trying to escape the impossible memory. A coffin. A hole. The darkness that had swallowed the heart of our family whole. Him — the much-loved shadow in the room.
I had tugged the sheets up over my head, cloaking myself in a textile cocoon, yearning for metamorphosis from sorrow. Then I would stop and pull you tighter.
I had always tossed and turned, never sleeping through. If I could only close my eyes and place his long-dead body out of my mind. But then I’d startle and heave the petals back. Terrified I’d lost him, my shadow. Him the part I can still hold.
Tonight you caught my fall. Again, decades later. An unyielding gentle friend. Without resentment at my forgetting you. Or concern that I’d slept in another’s embrace.
I crumpled over, exhausted, remembering — caressing the tatty edges of our collective unravelling. I drew the sheets — my long-lost sanctuary — up over my head once more. I heard the whisper, “Welcome home.” The affirming touch that everything was going to be all right.
Resting my head on the dutiful pillowcase, it didn’t matter that in the morning, its threadbare fibres would catch my own. New strands would lie fallen, mixed with the cotton, leaving fresh patches on my scalp and in my psyche.
The blooming lilac buds and the olive foliage, and the alabaster reminded me.
I was held and loved, embraced by the warmth, not the cold of that hole from so long ago. I was allowed to be all of who I am. The mess, the balding, the pain, the regret, the loss. The fading colours. The years of playing hide and seek with the shadow I hated and adored.
That my little brother is waiting for me patiently, as the sheets have done, just on the other side of tomorrow.
