I try to remember when I last loved my brother.  I can't recall that hour. I love my brother's son, and I love my brother's daughter.  I do not love his wife.  If my brother came to my door tonight, I'd ask him into my home and help him if possible.  My brother would come to my door tonight only in a time of need.  He would quietly say, "I must have your help." He has come before. 

Typically, I am not jealous of others.  Rarely do I covet.  Most wanting left me years ago.  Today I am happy with a sack, a book, a place to write.  I have given many possessions away, and if  you ask for something I have, I'll try to share without reserve.  When I was a child, however, I resented that my brother held the cup of all parental promise.  He was the chosen one, and I desired his place.  He was also a son in a family that valued sons.  My brother bore the chest of a father's hope.

Yet, my brother never interested me.  He was controlling, dismissive, non-protective, rough. Wrongly, my brother was inappropriate in his play with my sister and I when we were small.  My sister has no memory.  She is the younger, and I am her memory.  I don't recall my frustrations with his intrusions, I do recall my father beating him.  I remember tucking behind a door while he bleated and screamed.  I do recall being instructed to never tell our mother. 

I've let go of most of the memories that have kept me a prisoner of anger bound to my brother.  At some point, I made the call that he was lonely and trapped within himself.   He was tall, beautiful, and aloof.  He was violent, and kept our home in turmoil.  He was disregarding, impulsive, impatient, and fast.  My mother cried often as he left rooms in cross destruction.

Today my brother is a ghost.  He has no life of consequence.  He hosts the type of cancer that eats away a soul.  The May day he crested a hill and forced my mother off the road a few feet from her home, he lost any remainder of heart.  In careless disregard, he caused my mother's premature death as surely as he caused his own premature hell.  He left her fetal body fallen on the melting floor.  He must have known she was the driver huddled there as flames pelted through the roof.  Does recognition matter?  The point is over ten years ago my brother was high and incidentally restricted from operating a vehicle. Addicted and blatantly using, my brother caused the crash, and he left the scene.  He left our mother, dying, burning.  

Still, he is my brother. Photographs do not lie.  Or do they? He is standing in the Easter shot, his blue shirt pressed, his arm across my shoulders in the park.  I see my mother rocked him as a babe.  My dashing father carried him high upon his shoulders.  He slept under the same roof. My brother was moody and closed himself into his room after dark. I listened between walls as he played the songs of the sixties.   We shared the same table.  I often hid his unwanted peas in my napkin, rolled from the lip of a Sunday plate.   In pictures, my brother and I were photographed as roamers. Together we fished off banks, rode bikes, threw darts, and ate watermelon on a blistering day.  The pictures suggest some kind of agreement.  In reality, we raced through youth, and the more he grew the more I waged war on his lack of civility.

I don't know when I loved my brother last.  At some point, I stopped keeping negatives.  I stopped wanting his place.  I stopped trying to justify our lives, our fate.  I stopped keeping score.