Nostalgia

Outside, it was thundering. A pre-summer storm, brewing, grumbling and flashing. Kitty was scared, or perhaps intrigued, by the curious suddenness, loudness and bright flashes. I lay in bed next to mum, as she recounted stories and memories of times gone by…

…how when I was so little and took the train to school everyday on my own… how mum took up driving lessons because she wanted to be able to bring us to school before… how I was left here to fend and feed myself when I was just 14… how cruel it must have been to leave me, to leave us behind… how easily I, we, could have turned out badly, but how luckily we did not…

Feelings of nostalgia washed over us, as we recounted old days. Then I was so small, and those days now seem so far away now. How big I have grown, and how also very distant I have become from this place, this home.

I feel it especially this time, as I come home to the Netherlands, and see that so many things are still the same… the way brother is, the way things are placed and organised (or not…)… the way the houses and people appear to be the same. To someone like me, who has flown across the world, lived a new life and lived new experiences, it feels constraining, somewhat frustrating too to be back in my ‘old’ life, in my old surroundings.

What can I say when brother is still the same moody self? What can I do when all he does after coming home from work is sit down and watch movies or play games online? I see mum, disappointed and bitter, despite repeated attempts to get him out of the chair, to get him to move, or to get him to be engaged in conversation… yet, almost nightly I see him, back faced to us, hunched over his computer in the living room, lost in his own little world.

Perhaps brother is suffering, brooding, and escaping this world, this loneliness and frustration he feels deep inside… perhaps he cannot express what he feels, cannot put into words the touchy-feely emotions that trouble him, because he has been socialised to be strong, to be a man, to be devoid of weaknesses like emotions, and indeed, the very fact of having weaknesses as such… I see him, unhappy, somewhat lost, and lonely, unhealthily getting bigger due to his diet and the incessant smoking… I wish to help him, but I do not wish to ruin him by continuing an old and unhealthy pattern of allowing him to be dependant on others… he must stand up on his own, learn to live life alone and learn to take care of himself, love himself and be content with himself…

Otherwise, like today, like so many times and days in the past, mum goes to bed, full of worry, full of stress and pain and frustrations at the fact that his son, in whom she and dad have invested so much time and effort, is losing himself in old habits, in depression and unexpressed and unspoken anxieties…

Perhaps, it is I that need help… for I am forever being critical and being unaccepting of the circumstances here. But when I come back here, and see that life continues as if I have never left, I am left with a sense of responsibility, of guilt that I left, that I will leave again soon to pursue my own life, to declare my independence. Yet back here, in the minds and lives of my family and loved ones, things still remain the same.

The unspoken silence, the untouchable distance, the reality of calling and talking merely based on whenever needs and wants arise… are we family still?