When I was little my brother was my best friend. He would have tea parties with me. I remember my mom made him take me outside and someone hit me while riding a bike. My brother chased him down, made him get off the bike, and he came to apologize to me. After the boy apologized to me. My brother threw the bike at him, he took me home and we watched scary movies for the rest of the night. That’s the night he told me beetle juice would come for me if i didn’t give him all my snacks. I would climb into his bed, and we would talk about anything my little mind could think of. He would scare me, make fun of me, but there was never a time I had to question if he loved me. The older we got the more that would change.
Soon life would change for us and we had no idea just how big this change was going to be.
My mom and her boyfriend were losing the house we had grown up in. So while they found a place we were going to go stay with my grandmother (my dad’s mom). It wasn’t supposed to be for long. Just long enough for them to get everything handled. I ended up being there for a year. When my mom showed up to take us my brother didn’t want to leave. My grandmother and my mom talked for a while. Next thing I know it’s time to leave and my brother isn’t coming with us. It was the first time in my life that we wouldn’t be together. I cried all the way back to my mothers house. I loved my brother. How was he going to make it without me? I took care of him, and now I wouldn’t be able to. For the first time in my life I felt really alone. I was about 6 or 7 when this happened.
I spent the summer with my mom and her boyfriend. She would disappear for days at a time leaving me home alone. So her boyfriend called my grandma (y’all know how that story goes) she came to get me on her way to church one night.
So I went to live with my grandma (mom’s mom) . The funny thing is when I got there my brother was there already. Strange thing is he wasn’t happy to see me. He felt like I was following him. I was the reason that he had to move from home to home. He didn’t really talk to me much or really want anything to do with me while I was there.
Eventually he ended up leaving and I stayed and we didn’t really talk much after that. We both were living with family but you would’ve thought we ended up with different families. It’s like my dad’s side and my mom’s side didn’t speak to each other. So it made it real easy for us to grow up not talking to each other. Which also made it easy for people to try to turn us against each other. I used to hear things like he couldn’t wait to get away from you. My favorite was “ ya moms dont want you, ya father don’t want you, and now ya brother dont even want you”. I knew it wasn’t true, but the more I heard it the more I started to believe it. Which is a regret of mine still to this day. There were so many moments in my life when I really needed my brother and he was just a phone call away. I just never picked up the phone.
It wasn’t until after our mom died that we really started to work on and repair our relationship. I remember after our mom passed away we were talking and he hugged me and he told me we were all we had left. He was right. Our dad was in the wind. Our mom was dead. It was me and him against the world. By then our bond that we had when we were little had been broken. We weren’t the same and things would never be the same again. We both knew that we needed to be there for each other. So we worked to repair our relationship. We may not have tea parties like we used to and he may not be able to cheat me outta my snack anymore, but if anything ever happens I know we’re gonna ride together. That’s my heart.
A Moment in my TRUTH 