Isaac Left
by
Nathanael Smith


I just dropped Isaac off at the airport, saw him through security and saw him disappear. As he left my final field of vision, my heart just about jumped out of my chest. Relief like an insurmountable blanket made me feel guilty. I'm supposed to enjoy my family, be the best and most longing son that my parents have (after all, I am the only one who no longer lives at home, no?) and my brothers are supposed to be like extensions of myself. We're supposed to vibe at the root and just stick together after that. Well, I guess we do stick together, nobody's going to hurt one of us without getting hurt, but somehow I don't feel like a single unit with my brother anymore. We fell apart.

I nearly said we grew apart, but it's not true. We just kinda split ways and when we no longer lived under the same roof, we ceased communications. We weren't integral in eachother's life like we used to be: there were times in my life when every day away from my brothers was that much purgatory, and every thing they said was like a sign from God. I guess I started work, and I didn't have as much time to spend with my bro's, greasing the slope for when I went to college and they went to Kansas. I had learned how to spend time away from my family, and my family had in some small way accustomed themselves to the peace that existed when I was gone.

When I moved back to Kansas, the reunification never really occurred. Nobody imagined anything had changed, but it had. Just like when you grow a cutting from a tree, you can't really see the difference between the branch and the new tree, but there is a difference. A very big difference: the difference between total reliance and incidental interaction. If you put the cutting under the tree it came off of, you can't even see that it doesn't belong, but it's no longer part of the tree. In just such a way, I lived with my family, but they were no longer my family, they were just a nice family that had allowed me to live with them while I wasn't at school.

So when I moved back to Texas, I wasn't heartbroken to leave. I was emotional, perhaps, for the few moments when I realized that I was in fact leaving Kansas, but I think it may have had to do more with the longtime tradition that a leaving child is supposed to really miss his family. If you don't feel emotional, then at least rub your eyes so they're red, then cry a couple crocodile tears and sniffle, tell Mommy you'll miss her oh, so much, and wave forever as you drive out of sight.

As soon as you're out of sight, of course, your true emotions surface: delight, excitement, glee. You're on your own, you've got the helm of your life; your next step is your own, not carefully placed by a dearly loved but sometimes overbearing mother.

Traditionally, Mommy keeps her apron strings around her little boy's wrists even after he goes, and only slowly do they disintegrate and flutter away in the gale of life. Not so in my case. When I left, we all waved at eachother and promised to keep the rules that everyone's supposed to know: send cookies, send money, and whatever else normal family do.

Oh, and they did send cookies. Once. At Christmas time. When they were sending cookies to all of the relatives. I'm not sad, I'm not disappointed, I'm not chagrined by this lack of attention, I rather prefer it, actually... No need to worry about trying to appease my parents, no need to stress about "what will Dad demand?" It was a much easier life: learn the new standards, the new rules, the new expectations of the new set of people. Create a new, more fluid family that I can continue to update and refine as I see fit, until I find the perfect set of friends. Then somebody moves away and you have the opportunity to add a new face, or to grow apart from someone else.

A lack of definition somehow makes for alot less pain and stress: you can do as you please, and as long as there's nobody with a trump up their sleeve, it's all OK. The lack of permanence means that even if you do get into one messy relationship or another, you can always seem to find some excuse for getting out of it, some reason why these friends just can't be yours anymore. You have license to be a selfish coward, no longer do you have the guides that you should have relied on all this time.

Even with this totally different light in your eyes, however, the people who were your everything in days past still want to be your best friends. Sadly, your heart has carefully scarred over the places where they took a piece. You have to start at the beginning again, learn the person all over again, discover the person they are and the different worldview that they have developed.

With a relationship that was deep in the past, though, you already know what they like, their turns of phrase, the way they comb their hair. You still have some of the flowers of the friendship, but you lost the root. You know the what, but not the why. It's harder to fill in the missing bits when they appear so irrelevant anymore. Otherwise, you stay at the uncomfortable stage that is called stalking: knowing everything there is to know about a person and not knowing the person themself.

If I was to get to know my brothers again, though, I'd also have to go through all the annoyances of saying "goodbye" again, and I'd rather not have to do that. I'm rather pleased with my current state of unattachment.

I have my own friends. I don't need brothers anymore. I am completely independent and able to take care of myself.

I wonder if Isaac is OK, I hope he found his flight.