"I'm Not Crazy"

XIII.

Matthew wasn't all bad.

If I'm going to talk about siblings, then I have to get that part out of the way.

Matthew was complicated. Matthew was a child stuck in the same household as me. Matthew didn't have the power to direct things. Matthew was just existing under circumstances completely out of his control. Matthew was trying. Matthew was funny. Matthew was stuck.

A step sibling probably can't compare to a real sibling. We weren't born under the same roof. We were not raised with the same parents. We only actually lived together for a couple of short years.

What the two of us had between us was like a mountain compared to that of Riley and Bryn. I don't think we could possible come close to measuring up against people that shared a womb. We barely even shared a home.

But he was my stepbrother, and for a time, that counted as something.

The first time he was ever nice to me was the first anniversary of my fathers death. I'd only known Matthew and his father for about 8 months at this point, and we hadn't even moved in together yet. My mom was still an unmarried widow. Franklin was still a Mormon bachelor. They'd been engaged for a rather short time.

I was crying. I was always an overtly emotional child, but it tended to come out of me explosively. I could be calm and collected until the switch flipped. Then I was bathed in some unforeseen insanity.

In this instance, I'd been calm all day. We'd had a picnic as a blended unmarried family, and I'd played on a playground. My mother had refrained from mentioning my father, but I knew. It was the type of knowledge that just stuck with you. As an almost 9 year old, I could at least read a calendar. They'd taught me as much in school.

So the late afternoon came, and there was a deafening silence across the park where my fathers name should have been uttered. I excused myself from their picnic to sit under the slide, and that was where I sobbed.

I want to have some level of compassion for myself here. That child under the slide became a liar and mess later, but in this moment I think all of her sorrow was justified. Her father was dead. Her mother was holding hands with a new man, and the weight of grief was so unbelievably heavy on such a small body. She was not at fault for the tears that were falling. I don't see room for compassion for many of my different forms, especially the ones that came after this, but in that moment the girl under the slide was in justifiable pain. She was hurting.

I remember the bark dust under my shins aching. I was kneeled down with my hands clenched together tightly, almost in the form of praying, and the tears coming out of my eyes were hot and thick. My throat hurt. My cheeks burned. I was snotty and congested and devastated physically. I looked pitiful.

Then an arm appeared over my shoulder, and when I looked up expecting to see my mother, I saw a thirteen year old boy instead.

He was gangly back then. As soon as he started highschool his body filled out with toned muscles and thick brutish posture like his fathers, but that hadn't happened yet. Eventually his eyes would somehow become harder and more terrorized. For the time being though, it was easy to see him as just a boy. His brown eyes were kinder and his facial features were soft and more sympathetic than I'd ever expected from the boy that rarely looked at me with little more than annoyance.

"It's gross, isn't it?" He asked casually. He gestured vaguely in the direction of where our parents were seated. "They don't even know eachother and they want us to sit there and act like a happy little family."

I stared back at him. It was one of the first times I'd ever found myself lost for words, unable to formulate sentences to respond. Matthew didn't talk to me the way other people did. He didn't treat me like a kid in need of simple words. He expected me to keep up.