Wearing My Smile | ✔

Wednesday, November 4th, 1998

I suppose I need to learn how to forgive myself since you'd made it clear you'd never blamed me, Sam, not for anything. But some days, like today, it is so hard not to. I know we were just little kids, running around and laughing from one place to another. My backyard, your front yard, hanging onto the beams of my front porch, jumping down from that mango tree you hated as much as you loved, the flamingo pond, the yellow willow park, the small library at the corner of Crossing End Street, swinging by the rusty swing set, the clearing in the north wood, our treehouse hideout. Months after months passed, you were with me always, and yet, still, I didn't understand your sadness when no one else was looking. If you'd been here right now, I'm sure you'd have told me it didn't matter anymore, not for a long time.

Those people we'd told our stories to, they liked to assume that our lives had started only after eight. When my eyes collided with yours after I'd run after you even before I even knew your name. The past eight years of our lives before didn't seem to exist. I wonder if they were right. I wonder if I existed before I met you at all, Sam. It is such an ungrateful, terrible, and mournful thing to say, so I don't say it out loud, but I really can't imagine myself without you until I began to live it. I am only Roo because you are Sam and, at one point in my life, I thought it was all that mattered.

You'd have probably realized later that my father was rarely ever home. He was a nature and wildlife professional photographer, as you'd known. As cool as the job sounded, it was an incredibly lonely profession for us.

He couldn't let it go, though. I get it now, but I didn't understand it then. I might have told you once that I hated how he was never around. He was alive but he felt dead to me at the time. You told me once, “This kind of feelings would pass, Roo. We humans could get used to almost anything.” I knew. I knew, God, I knew it to be true, but I can't stand thinking about it because then I would wonder if someday I'd ever get used to you not being here anymore.

When we were nine, Luce was already seventeen, so she was out of the house more often than not. Except when she’s driving me to and from school and when she had to cook for me. At least, until I could do it myself.

Before you came along, I used to spend most of my spare time on my back porch. Have I ever told you that? Days after I saw you fell from that tree, I started sitting on the front porch, waiting for you to come home. You'd always come to me with that wide grin on your face, shining full of mischief after you finally managed to overcome your shyness, one that seemed to come harder as we grew older.

You jumped onto my front porch one day, throwing away your backpack to the yard before you started pacing around me in silence. I remember watching you because I understood you enough to let you mull over at what to say. I guessed that you had a news. What I couldn't figure out was if it was a good one or a bad one.

When you looked at me, your eyes were wild. You were exhilarated, I realized, so much that it looked like you were panicking. I didn't ask you, I didn't say anything. I looked back at you with a smile on my face and waited patiently because I knew even then you'd always tell me. You told me everything. It seemed to me that it was what I was doing the whole time we'd been friends, Sam. Waiting.

“Roo.”

“What is it?”

“My mom.”

“What about your mom?”

“She's pregnant,” you finally blurted. I studied you. The excitement upon your face, the panic, then finally the relief.

“Oh,” I breathed out, because I felt your relief as if it was my own.

You started to smile then. The way happiness colored your face was blinding me and I found myself wanting to hug you. You laughed and my mind keeps playing tricks on me now, convincing me of how crisp it had sounded before everything went to shit. You whispered reverently to me, “I'm going to be an older brother.”

It never occurred to me that not many children of your age would feel this painfully happy over having younger siblings.

It was awful to wish for any other person to live inside that cursed house of yours. My therapist would probably tell me that it was not wrong of me to be happy knowing my best friend wouldn't look so lonely anymore, because as little as I was, I'd probably thought siblings would drive away the sadness. But it really didn't, did it? I don't know why I'd ever think that. You know how lonely I'd been inside my own house, in the middle of my absent family members. How my home often felt like it was trying to choke me with its suffocating sadness. So, I don't know why I'd ever thought giving you new little rascals would suddenly guarantee your happiness.

You must have understood this somehow, even then, when we were still too young to be able to see further than the next few days. You must have, because if you hadn't, you wouldn't have despised children so much when we were fifteen, even the sight of them drove you to an explosive anger. You told me once you hated it when your younger cousins came by your house with their obnoxious chatter. You always looked as if you were disgusted. You punched that boy at school one afternoon because he pulled another girl's hair, then slapped her hand away when she tried to thank you.

You must have known. And that was why you didn't blame the universe. You didn't blame it when two months later, I had to accompany you in the hospital because your mother had just lost the baby.