The Randomness I Occasionally Feel Like Posting (or TRIOFLP for short)

Something I wrote for school

Everyone in town had told my parents I was a bad idea.

My three older siblings were close in age, and were rowdy and rough, as teenagers should be. I was born six years after the one before me, gentle and quiet and lonely. It's pretty much destiny for the eldest and youngest child to be either rivals or strangers, but Cooper and I were neither.

He kicked me under the table, prying my eyes from my dish to his face. He was grinning. He was planning. I glanced at mom, lost in her book. I glanced at my sisters, one trying to swipe food off the other's plate. I glanced back at my brother, still smiling at me in that way he did.

I quirked an eyebrow, letting him take the lead. His eyes sparkled.

"Gosh, mom! Ollie's looking awfully pale," he said, the humor in his voice clear as the evening moon outside. "Maybe I could take him—"

"Yes, you can go outside." She didn't even look up from her book. "Be back in before Anna and Courtney decide to take showers. They'll steal all the hot water."

I rolled my eyes, bottling up the laugh that was bubbling in my throat. Cooper looked stunned. "Well alright." his amusement returned. "You know me well, mom. C'mon Ollie!"

------------------------------------

"Do you ever think about dad?" He frowned. I think for a moment his hands clenched.

I closed my eyes, remembering his face and his voice and his hands, weathered and veined with all those years of life sitting on his shoulders. I think age looked good on him.

"No," I lied. And he could tell I was lying because he kept talking.

"I'm mad at mom," he said. "She's moving on too fast. He's just a shadow in her memory at this point. She's taking his pictures off the wall. Did you see that?"

I shook my head, my hair being thrown around with it.

"Well she has. Little by little. She thinks I won't notice, but I do. The one in the kitchen was first, that one of him in hospital. I tried to talk to her. She said it made her sad."

Guilt crawled its way into my chest. "It makes me sad, too."

"I know. But would you have taken it down if you could?"

I thought for a moment. A breeze fell over us. The sun was leaving its last marks on the sky before it left for the night. "No. No, I wouldn't."

"Then it's different." He nodded, satisfied. "She took down the one above the couch, too. Just this morning, when she thought everyone was sleeping. You know, the big one of your first christmas." He said it like I wasn't already thinking it.

It was a giant photo of an attempt at a nice family setting, but Uncle Fred accidently snapped it when Anna was ripping a present open while Courtney was pulling her hair. Cooper was making faces at me, and mom wasn't looking at the camera.

She was looking at dad. Dad was hooked up to several machines, and looked ready to pass out while doing nothing in his favorite rocking chair.

"Oh." I wasn't sure what to say. Nothing I ever said came out right, so I thought it best I spoke as little as possible.

I loved that picture. Uncle Fred insisted on having it framed. I say insisted, but it didn't take much convincing for mom to agree. It hung over our couch for a decade, keeping our living room comedic in a house of sorrows.

Other part:

"It just hurts all the time," he'd said with a breaking voice and tears in his eyes.

"Where?" I'd asked. And he laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed. A broken, hollow, sad laugh.

Then he dropped it. So I did too. And we never brought it up again. But I knew it was still there, beneath his skin, a quiet but everlasting storm. Sometimes it would sneak its way to his eyes and throat in the middle of the night. But he didn't talk so I didn't ask.

Other other part:

"Why don't you ever just say you're happy, or angry, or sad?"

"Too simple."

"Is it?"

"Sadness can't be described by a three letter word. My sadness is a universe and three quarters."

"See, and then you go and say things like that. I don't understand the words you say, Solace Ollie Galene."

"Maybe you're on the other side of the river."

"Other side of the river," He echoed. Then we went back inside.

"Sometimes I wonder—" and I cut myself off right then, my lips still parted like I had more to say but I didn't. I think that's all I meant to say. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder.