Wearing My Smile | ✔

Saturday, November 11th, 2000

I think we were eleven when my father came for a month off from his constant traveling due to his job and asked us to prepare for a camping at the nearest campsite right at the foot of the hills on the southern part of the town. You were ecstatic. I thought back then that you were because you'd never camped before, but now I wonder if you were that happy because you got to spend time with my father, because he treated you like his own son, too.

As you'd known, my father came back home once every year. I could never point which month he would go back, but when he did, he would stay for a month or so. He was a “cool dad” as you'd told me before when we were eight and he came back for the first time. You'd sniffed at me and given me a look.

“What?”

“You're so lucky,” you'd grumbled that time.

I hadn't told you I'd known that I was, not because of my father like the way you'd implied, but because I always had you around. Loneliness was a problem I could never fix and you didn't understand what a gift it was to have a best friend you could share everything with.

After we packed up the camping gears, we went into the car and we sang the whole way with the windows down. At some point we were laughing so hard we were crying over some stupid jokes my father said. I forgot what the jokes were, but I remember sometime after the car neared the hills with the sun filtered through the yellow and red leaves, you raised your left hand, Sam, the one you'd broken and injured many times after the falling off tree incident it started to scar everywhere and tremble. You raised your left hand as if to catch the patches of lights on your skin, and I swear, I swear to you I thought I was seeing a golden little god. I was so in awe with you, but you took your hand back into the car with a sad look on your face, a look much older than we were. A look I should have understood because I saw it every time I looked into the mirror.

We laughed a lot that day, especially when my father tried to teach us how to use a fishing pole on the nearest shallow stream. You sucked at it. Well, I did, too, shut up, but I'm sure we could have gotten better if we'd been practicing more over the years, but we hadn't and that is one of many things I regret. You would have told me, “Nothing you can do, you carry your burden, I carry mine.” but it hurt me either way. I'd wanted to see your laugh more than I'd gotten the chance in the past decade. I think that's the problem. I always want for more.

The next morning, when my father asked me to put away the camping tools, I didn't question him, but I saw as he held you tightly in his arms, how you clung onto him, shaking, shaking, shaking, so vulnerable as you wept. I wondered if my father knew then what had happened to you. I wondered why I hadn't noticed, why I hadn't asked more persistently. Instead, I waited in the shadows until you stopped crying and pulled away from his embrace, joking and elbowing you on our way back to the car as if I didn't notice a thing. I didn't think to ask my father what it was about. I should have, Sam. I should have.

I was silent because you'd been subdued the whole way back home. Once in a while, I noticed you were moving the fingers on your left hand, as if you were trying to remind yourself they were there, they could move, they still belonged to you. I didn't understand it then; your grief, your loss, your desperation.

I let you lean on my shoulder, sleeping, because you were hurting and I was just a little boy who didn't know what else to do.