Standing on My Brother's Shoulders

by Tara J Lal

  ‘Hey, is that guy Benny still stalking you?’

  I laughed, shaking my head as the truck drove off. In an instant the energy between Rob and me changed.

  ‘Who was that?’ he asked.

  ‘Just some of the boys from the city I used to work with.’

  ‘Why did they say that? Who’s that guy?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re just joking. Don’t worry about it. I think they’re talking about a guy I used to work with.’

  ‘What happened with him?’

  ‘Nothing. I honestly don’t even know what they’re talking about,’ I said with an edge of defensiveness in my voice. ‘I’ve never been out with any of them, never fancied any of them, and nothing has ever happened with any of them.’ I added, ‘They’re probably just trying to wind him up. They do that stuff all the time.’

  We went back to the hotel room, but I felt it hanging in the air like the smog Adam talked of in India.

  The next day Rob sent me a text when I was at work.

  ‘Please promise me there is nothing going on or has gone on between you and that other guy at work. I can’t stop thinking about it’

  I was gripped by an unstoppable jealously that made me unable to be honest with myself. My soul was not mine, but merely a reacting catalyst to another’s …

  It seemed that, no matter how much I reassured him, it was never enough. Then we started to talk about the last guy I’d been out with. I’d broken up with him four years before but we remained friends.

  ‘Why do you still see him?’

  ‘He’s a friend.’

  ‘So you still have feelings for him, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then, why are you friends?’ Rob’s voice changed. It didn’t feel loving.

  ‘We just hang out. It’s nice to have someone to go to dinner with.’

  ‘So you enjoy spending time with him?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’ It felt like a crime even as I said it.

  ‘So you must still have feelings for him?’ Suddenly his tone was cold.

  ‘Well, yes, I still care about him, but I don’t love him.’ Why did I feel as if I’d done something wrong?

  ‘You just said you didn’t have feelings for him.’

  I started to get frustrated. I felt like I was being backed into a corner.

  ‘He’s a friend. I care about my friends. Nothing has ever happened between us since the day we broke up over four years ago.’ And it was the truth.

  ‘So why does he buy you gifts, then?’

  ‘I don’t know … because he wants to.’

  ‘He obviously still loves you. You shouldn’t have accepted the gifts.’

  I looked at Rob. I couldn’t understand why it was so important and why I felt I needed to defend myself.

  ‘Maybe I felt guilty that I hurt him.’

  ‘Well, that’s not friendship, is it?’

  ‘Um, no, I guess not.’ Now I was confused. Maybe I had done something wrong. I could not identify what the emotion was that I felt ricocheting around my body. I was desperate to get out of the coldness for it seemed to slice through the fragile warmth in my heart. I wanted to get away from the ice. Every inch of my body screamed to get out.

  I know I should speak out, be open, yet it is in that final moment of imminent confrontation that I am dogged by self-questioning that removes the naturalness of it and so removes its credibility.

  Why should I not speak all of my heart to Sarah? Tell what I really have thought. The reason is because I do not love her but her idea, and that in my heart are vain selfish wants that do not coincide with what my sensible mind would prescribe as a suitable mould for my character to be.

  ‘I feel like walking away,’ I said quietly in an attempt to change the direction of our circular dance. I didn’t know why I said it. I just wanted his love back.

  Rob didn’t try to stop me and I began to cry. My tears dissolved his anger and with it, his coldness. He comforted me and I basked temporarily in the restoration of warmth and togetherness that I so craved. I persuaded Rob we should see a relationship counsellor. After hearing my family story the counsellor suggested I come on my own. Rob’s history wasn’t a problem for he had a strong supportive family. I knew I’d had a toughish family life but this was about our relationship, not me. I failed to recall that the therapist I saw with Anthony had said the same thing.

  I was due to fly to the UK for a month-long trip that I’d booked before I’d even met Rob. As the time neared, it felt as if he began to withdraw again. He didn’t kiss me as much. We didn’t sleep together as much. He didn’t send me messages every morning any more. They were only little things, or were they? They caused an itch, an inflammation of my old wounds, scratching at my insecurities. The malignant cancer that killed my mother now metastasized once again in my life, subtly yet destructively expressing its symptoms through my conflicted relationship.

  ‘Are you changing your mind about me?’ I asked tentatively one evening, seeking reassurance before I left for England.

  ‘I don’t know why you even say that,’ Rob said. He sounded cold and uninterested. I began to feel nauseous.

  Unwittingly, Rob had just thrown petrol on my bonfire. My instinct was right. Now that Rob knew me better he didn’t want me any more. Was it instinct or fear masquerading as instinct? My bonfire blazed, sending burning embers flying around my body, lighting spot fires of rejection and loss. What had started as a harmless bonfire without warning became a raging bushfire. Rob didn’t give me any water for my fire. He let it burn. I started to cry, once more craving togetherness. Only this time Rob never laid a finger on me. He felt icy cold, merely turning his back on me and rolling away. My throat and chest clamped.

  Bushfires create devastation. They destroy homes and lives, leaving a burnt ashen landscape. My fire consumed my body, hijacking my rational thought, my connection to myself. I lay in the dark next to the man I loved, engulfed by a crushing, suffocating aloneness. I could not get clarity, only panic.

  The more I sought comfort and compassion the more he turned his back. I was not able to explain my reactions for I did not understand them myself. As with all fires, the smoke obscured my vision. I travelled to the UK hanging by an emotional string, insecurities cascading out of control, feeling him withdraw, slipping out of reach, just like the coffin …

  Having left, I am full of this sense of loss. I think of Mum and Dad and all seems so far away, absent and lost …

  I didn’t receive the texts of undying love I so yearned for. On the phone, Rob felt remote. The more I reached, the further he ran. I had that feeling of living in a bubble again. It felt like it had after Adam died. I felt the familiar lump in my throat, the tightness across my chest. I tried to meditate, I tried to write and I tried to breath. I used every tool I had to try to find some peace, but I could not rid myself of the dread.

  Four weeks later, I arrived home. It was a Tuesday evening. I prayed I would melt into Rob’s arms at the airport and all my doubt would be gone. I smiled as I saw him. He gave me a hug. I hugged him, clung to him, praying he’d kiss me. He didn’t. He felt distant. Why hadn’t he kissed me? He said he was exhausted.

  ‘Of course, sweetheart, I understand, go to bed.’

  It was 9pm. I tried to hide my disappointment. Once again I lay awake, overcome by a hauntingly familiar yet intangible feeling of fear.

  The next morning, Rob left early for work, kissing me briefly on my forehead as he left. I fumbled my way through a day at work, clambering on roofs, repairing storm damage, ensconced in my bubble for my sense of foreboding shadowed me, like a thunderous cloud as I clung to the slates. I could not turn to Rob for help. I could not allow him to see my crumbling self, so I told him I was jet-lagged. I turned instead to one of my closest friends, falling into his warm open arms. I began physically to shake and sob. My body was at the hospital with my aunt once more, twenty-one years later reliving that haunting tidal wave of grief.

 
; After the tidal wave, the desolation set in. I was desperate to reconnect, to pierce my bubble, so I turned to writing. I wrote a long letter to Rob, just as I had for my father. As Adam had said;

  I tried to write what I felt, I hope it was okay but then what can be wrong in speaking as you feel, however vulnerable it may leave you …

  I left the letter in his apartment yet he never made any response to it. I went over to his place, hoping to talk. He didn’t want to talk. I clawed desperately at the walls of his cave just as I had clawed at my father’s tomb of depression. The more I pursued him emotionally the more he distanced me emotionally and physically. He retreated further and further into his cave, reinforcing it with ice. He started avoiding me. I tried to arrange to meet him, yet he’d always find some banal excuse.

  Finally, we spoke on the phone and within minutes he blurted out, ‘I’m too busy for a girlfriend.’

  ‘What?’ I was stunned. ‘Are you breaking up with me?’

  ‘I’m just too busy to have a girlfriend.’

  And that was it, the end of our short relationship, because he was ‘too busy’.

  What about your guarantees and your declarations of everlasting love? You promised you’d never leave me, I pleaded endlessly inside my head.

  The last couple of days have been so very thoughtful. I have thought of passion and compassion and why we have curbed it in our words when we feel it so strongly in our hearts.

  No answers. No more comfort blanket, just a rejection of my love. It had only been six months yet the intensity of the loss felt like a searing dagger being thrust repeatedly into my chest, shoving me kicking and screaming into the pain. It landed me in a crevasse where the darkness and silence were so familiar to the quicksand after Adam’s death that I could not differentiate between the two. I asked myself how such a short relationship could cause me such intense pain. I wondered what was wrong with me.

  It felt that if I let go of Rob, I would somehow be letting go of Adam. They were so entangled in my mind and in my heart. They both left me. Why did they leave me? They said they loved me but they left me anyway. Why did they do that to me? My love wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. Without their love for me I was nothing.

  Then the anger came. I don’t like anger. In fact, I hate it. I fear it and avoid it. I wanted to scream at Rob for promising he’d always be there when he wasn’t. I wanted to scream at the old lady who had commented on how she didn’t care for the likes of Adam in her neighbourhood. I wanted to scream at Adam’s ex-girlfriend for hurting him … at my father for not being there … at Jo for hurting Adam, and for not being there for us after Mum died. I wanted to lash out and stamp my foot, like a child, for finding myself here, once more, alone.

  ‘It’s not fair! Love me, love me. If you loved me, you’d be here …’

  Who, who would be here? I hate you all yet I crave your love.

  My anger mirrored Adam’s:

  Just the other day I was angry, a nagging frustration making me see the world with spite, hating everything that all these poncey people were fucking about at. The worst of it, there is no vent. I find myself constantly frowning as I wander from here to Hampstead. (God, could be the title of a book … From here to Hampstead, a pilgrim’s guide to puerility.) Unaware of the reason for it. I taunt myself with maybe it’s Sarah, but then shrug and say, no the fuck it isn’t. I’m just disenchanted, disenchanted with crap.

  Months went by and I kept thinking I should be over Rob by now. I started seeing a new therapist, and together we started to dig. Digging was hard. I hit rock after rock, and with every impact I uncovered old injuries. I unearthed skeletons that terrified me, ones I didn’t know existed. I didn’t know their origins or how deep they were buried.

  As we dug, so the panic returned, fear stalking me: my unconscious self in crisis once more. I didn’t know that there were predators in crevasses. I thought they were lifeless bar the creaking, groaning, moving ice. But a bird of prey can fly into a crevasse. It can swoop and snarl, sensing vulnerability, smelling blood. It pecked at my chest, leaving me fragile at the bottom of a fathomless crevasse, my heart bleeding, my head bleeding, fragile and motionless.

  One night as I lay in bed, in the depths of confused despair, I began to sob uncontrollably, howling. Then, without warning, something intangible swept through my body, and out of that dark moment came a life-changing message of clarity: ‘It’s just the same old pain, T.’ I felt it not just in my head but in the rich red blood that coursed through the capillaries in my heart. That realization felt like a gift for all the pain endured. This was old pain, not new pain. That knowledge sent me on my path to freedom from the past.

  CHAPTER 29

  I started to gather my tools. Anything I could lay my hands on to help me climb out of the crevasse in which I was trapped. Therapy was my ice axe, helping me to get a foothold to find some steadiness. My friends were my rope, my lifeline. I took pleasure in simple things. I looked after myself in any way I could. I wrote a journal, practised yoga and meditated (if you could call it that). I ate nutritious food, slept well and exercised, all the while storing up energy for the difficult climb ahead.

  I turned toward the fear, actively seeking it out so that I could confront it. For me, that meant enrolling in singing lessons. I could run into burning buildings, jump out of planes, smash through waves in a surfboat, but singing terrified me. For as long as I could remember I had mouthed the words to ‘Happy Birthday’. I didn’t even sing in the shower. I wanted to find my voice, to rid myself of the restriction I felt across my throat. When I stood in front of the mirror with my aptly named singing teacher Joy looking on I saw my vulnerability staring back at me. I saw my inner child hiding behind the chair in our living room and I wanted to cry. When I finally made a sound, standing in front of that mirror, it was as if vomit was rising from within, an overwhelming rush of emotion coursing through my body as if I was vomiting up the self-hatred.

  Joy told me that singing was about allowing oneself to be vulnerable. Perhaps it was for that reason that I dreaded every single lesson I attended, but I left every one, without fail, feeling empowered. Needless to say, the boys at work, being eager as ever to help, proceeded to burst into song every time they saw me, even singing rather than speaking the odd radio message. I remain a terrible singer, but I faced the fear and found my voice and I no longer mouth the words to ‘Happy Birthday’.

  When I opened my heart to Rob I found a frightened teenage girl huddled alone in the corner of a dark room. It was time to step into that room as the strong, grounded, mature adult Tara. Rob’s desertion forced me to revisit my past; that was his gift to me. I had thought he had come into my life to be my lover, my husband, the father of my children. I had so desperately wanted that. As it turned out, Rob allowed me to access a layer of grief that up until this time had entombed my heart. It had prevented me from living my life fully, and it was not allowing me to love.

  Sue, my therapist, said I had ‘faulty thinking’ with regard to love and anger.

  ‘Great,’ I thought. ‘I have faulty thinking.’

  Slowly we began to unravel my carefully sculpted but apparently ‘warped’ patterns of thinking.

  My shunning of anger spoke volumes about my need for approval, for support, for validation and most of all for love. My heart saw Adam’s suicide as the ultimate rejection of me and my love. For me, anger and love could not co-exist, so when the anger came, I syphoned it off to those around me, to anyone, just so long as it wasn’t directed toward Adam.

  I loved Adam so dearly, so avidly and idealistically, that I could not contaminate that love with any negative emotion. I stole my idea of love from the memory of a nineteen-year-old idealist and romantic and I carried that ideal with me for over twenty years.

  I suppose at heart I am an idealist and, however much I can see that maybe idealism is the punch-bag of realism for me, it holds a greater truth. For, is not an ideal a perfection?

  No one ever lived
up to Adam, the purity of love I held for him. I was safe and Adam was safe so long as nothing challenged my fairy tale of Adam and me. The irony was, this very fairy tale denied me a chance at love. I did not want to admit that it had been Adam who had asked the ultimate forgiveness of me, and that it was he who had let me down, who had left me alone with my pain. I closed my eyes and pictured my brother and me …

  I am standing on the side of my mountain. I have stopped walking, stopped my heavy trudge. I notice the weight upon me and the darkness of my cloak. I stand in the silence of nature with the soft wind upon my face. I speak with my brother.

  ‘Did I let you down, Ad? Did I?’

  In the silence, he speaks to me softly and with tenderness. ‘No, you didn’t let me down – I let you down.’

  I look at him and he at me and for the first time I acknowledge softly, ‘Yes, you did.’ We are standing, looking at each other, two souls touching each other in the field of nature.

  ‘What should I do, dear brother? Please tell me. Help me.’

  ‘Go forward without me, my beautiful sister. Let me go. Let me lie here. You don’t need me any more. Go live your life as you want it to be, embrace it, have passion, be free of me.’

  I stand still, looking at my brother, my other half, my mirrored soul, my heart – yet also my burden, my chains, my cloak. I look up ahead of me uncertainly, oscillating between the past and the future, the solitude and uncertainty of the way up versus the familiarity and comfort of the path behind me. Adam nods at me reassuringly. He lifts his hand to take my cloak. I remain still, torn. The wind stops. My brother nods once more in an unspoken gift of freedom.

  I begin to walk tentatively, checking to look back all the while, still seeing my brother looking at me – nodding, smiling his beautiful radiant smile. I keep walking, my feet feeling firmer on the ground, looking back less often until I turn and Adam is just a spot on the horizon. I cannot let him go completely. I need to be able to see him, to be able to check he is okay. Just the line of sight, that’s all, enough to keep the cord alive.