Dark Comedy in the Pandemic

a handwritten letter

Dear April,

How are you? What a time to be alive, eh? I hope this email finds you well and in good health. Mental, physical, spiritual, any kind of health, as I realize that we can't always have all of em at once, all the time.

Thank you for commissioning this letter. It's meant a lot to me, knowing I have to do something. Now, the fear of having to do something! 

You asked me to say something about siblings, what a subject. Do you have any siblings? I have a bunch of them and as I now (today in fact) firmly hit my middle 30s, it's been amazing as even the most ironclad bonds with my own have melted over and over again only to find new attachments. 

Mathematics says that our longest relationships in a natural lived life, are with these people born of our people (or raised alongside of us), those blessed monsters afflicted with the same issues and plagued oftentimes by the same DNA as ourselves, navigating outward while speaking the same emotional language, or something similar. Scraps, second hand clothes, talking til we fell asleep, walking to school, fighting, waiting for our mom, sacrificing, teaching, talking, misleading, getting drunk and high together, going to meetings later down the road together, grieving together, living, acting like magnets circling and repelling and attracting when we've needed it, as children, teens, and adults.

My mom said that none of us grew up under the same roof, that's true. All told I have five sisters and two brothers. A few of us are in the same territory of life, what we want out of it, how we've chosen to go about it, but largely we are all different. We all have a similar sense of humor, look, disposition, tendency toward gloom but even how we go about these things is uniquely our own. I sometimes wonder if we who we are can be traced to the origin gaps fought over and left to us by our siblings. That we push and pull and merge to chisel our behaviors out of the same raw material in hopes of finding an identity that suits ourselves. To make one of oneself distinct and remote enough to strike a tone of independence, yet interrelated and familiar enough to maintain bonds with those we love. What about an only-child? I would reckon they'd compensate by applying this same thing to guardians, relatives, friends, more intensely. My dad said I started eating faster the more kids that showed up. Calorie competition. I ended up the tallest, so I guess I won? Although, I've heard it's not good for later in life health to be too tall, so maybe not? 

It's also been interesting as the luster of youth gets stripped away, how each of our charms become a bit more fixed and less charming. How without the sheen of potential and suggestion of growth that youth provides, I am forced to confront that these people I grew up with are not on some pathway toward self idealization and neither am I. Family, so conditioned to view one another in such narrow perspective to maintain emotional order in who we ourselves are, valuable reference points we all serve to one another, until we swerve. I've noticed it with my siblings toward me too, how I am viewed as who I am to them but also given less patience if I turn to agonizing over the same old things I always have, or behave in ways I always have.   

Today is my 35th birthday. My siblings have called and texted me then started talking about themselves. The one whose birthday it is, becomes most importantly a listener to those doing the happy birthday wishing. I wouldn't have it any other way, I don't think. All told, my greatest illuminations, multiplications, lessons of self have been alongside and through my siblings. It's been a brilliant safeguard to learn and practice learning with people who ultimately will allow more leeway than anyone else out there. Sure there have been falling outs, silent cold harsh periods, arguments, creative dissolutions, disagreements about our parents, and all the rest of the dramas, but there has been love, and care, and someone to play with most of the time. A bond, a terrible one that exists even after all the breaks, where the invisible threads snap and still something remains implanted and communicative. What a difficult proposition being a human, how much nicer to have a few going through it with us, siblings, parents, relatives, friends, authors, performers, musicians, just people.

It's times like these (unifying surreal conflicts) my attention centers in on how important people are to one another. After enough bad experiences where the world just keeps on going, there has been something profound about everyone having to more or less slow down for each other. In the midst of all that we clash about, it is still only us, and I hope we can find our way through. It's a lot to ask of a bunch of billions of people I don't know or even necessarily tend to like, but I like to believe in a larger thing that doesn't take into much account my pettiness. 

I've spent my day with a low pulse, relaxing and eating with my girlfriend. We went hiking the other day behind the mountains where my siblings and I grew up for a time, and her and I picked up some allergies that have lingered the past few days. Back when we were kids up there, we didn't know we had allergies even if we had them. It was an extreme part of our childhood. We lived a few years in a trailer with no electricity above the ocean up in Malibu with our mom, it was wild and strange and returning to it a few days ago under the same energy of newly bizarre circumstances felt whole. I remember so vividly how we'd run around the foundations of burned down homes, barefoot and aimless, skateboarding in empty pools, sleeping on our trampoline in the summertime and how the other day my girlfriend and I laid on a picnic table high up there, alone, where my feral siblings and I used to roam, and still in my mind, do.

I hope this finds you well and staying sane and feeling all right out there.

All the best,

Josh

*during the Covid-19 quarantine*