I am not myself he got lost a long time ago except bits of him rise to my surface from his sunken wreckage like his winsome smile or the cardigan with the home-knitted parrot on the pocket in a snap of him fishing with our brother and here’s the teddy with the pointy arm sucked into shape for his Granny to mend alongside the monkey glove puppet Mum bought when finally she surrendered him with rabbit fur encircling its painted face a consolation for his wet cheek to lie against a catalogue of comforts that I thought were lost

him I lost eventually in the shadows from which he just never re-emerged my Orphic myth for he descended into Hades I know since I was with him still in those days especially when that former RA 2nd Lieutenant with the Palestine medal abused him but I’m not someone who can afford to look back and he ever the infidel not one to embrace Resurrection either so there was no way out and he could not retrace his steps condemned to move forwards ever deeper into the mire 

so how come I escaped 

it may have happened like this 

his chrysalis I wrapped him up in the nice boy of his first five years when our mother had loved him to bits until I was ready to emerge on iridescent wings of thought and word from which he could not find a way out himself because my cocoon it was his destiny to be left behind as the dried-out husk of what I was not meant to be yet without blame in his heart and feeling no anger because he understood I would sit here today somehow not without him and write to conjure him up as if he were sitting on my desk like a djinn in a bottle waiting for me to pull the cork his flotsam floating on my surface not something he sends from his depths but what I dredge up 

I don’t know how he would feel about that but I do know that he doesn’t want to be forgotten his reflection lingering on my water and his echo in my chamber his story tells me what he did not know back then that Hell is indeed other people^[1] and in a world of children and parents the powerless lose out however satisfying defiance may be being oppositional resolves nothing when the abused have only one role model condemning them either to remain the victim or become the abuser themselves except that at least in our stories we can send in a rescuer to resolve the tension between persecutor and victim so we can all go home and sleep in peace even if in real life one such doesn’t always turn upmaturity may have been denied him but that boy became this man and here is a third option one that looks beyond the childlike and the flailing parent to the grownup in the room resolution my role in life so that everyone is safe too late for the boy in short trousers with the winning smile maybe but Echo Zeus Orpheus Hansel Theseus Narcissus no just-us him and me my Rescuer even though I had not been his and what follows is not a story but a truth

^[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos 1943