My excellent brother came for a visit this afternoon. He opened the front gate and paused to admire the plastic pink flamingos he planted in my front garden before walking up the path announcing I am here and I am beautiful!
We wandered up into Newtown with him rejecting all of my favourite places to eat, he declared himself the I Ching of lunch and stopped regularly to proclaim that we should turn west, even if that meant straight into a brick wall. The I Ching of lunch eventually lead us into a dank thai restaurant for $7.50 lunch specials where we sat companionably, I was talking earnestly on small matters, he was randomly interrupting with an unrelated witty aside.
After lunch walking down King St puffing on cigarettes and examining human shaped knife blocks for sale in a shop window I suddenly made sense to myself. This happens almost every time I stand next to my brother. His height, his broad shoulders and barrel chest somehow put me into perspective. I cease to feel too tall, too unusual looking with hair too big. His hair is wild, huge, you can tell this even from his neat short haircut. His eyes are dark, much darker than mine, bearing traces of unknown ancestry but with the same almost imperceptible hint of an Asian curve as mine. My eyes are green, my skin is pale, his eyes were so black when he was born the doctors thought he might be blind. He is swarthy and handsome, almost identical to my father, very Continental as ladies used to whisper as my father walked by.
I am thinking again of place and displacement, of all the molecules breathed by my Grandparents on their different continents, the Home Counties, the ice, amber and humidity of Estonia, the jungles of India merging into Shanghai and the always distant echo of Portugal. All of this is who I am and who I never will be. The woman adoring her new life in the Inner West and desperately missing the unexpected spaces of Western Sydney.
We wandered up into Newtown with him rejecting all of my favourite places to eat, he declared himself the I Ching of lunch and stopped regularly to proclaim that we should turn west, even if that meant straight into a brick wall. The I Ching of lunch eventually lead us into a dank thai restaurant for $7.50 lunch specials where we sat companionably, I was talking earnestly on small matters, he was randomly interrupting with an unrelated witty aside.
After lunch walking down King St puffing on cigarettes and examining human shaped knife blocks for sale in a shop window I suddenly made sense to myself. This happens almost every time I stand next to my brother. His height, his broad shoulders and barrel chest somehow put me into perspective. I cease to feel too tall, too unusual looking with hair too big. His hair is wild, huge, you can tell this even from his neat short haircut. His eyes are dark, much darker than mine, bearing traces of unknown ancestry but with the same almost imperceptible hint of an Asian curve as mine. My eyes are green, my skin is pale, his eyes were so black when he was born the doctors thought he might be blind. He is swarthy and handsome, almost identical to my father, very Continental as ladies used to whisper as my father walked by.
I am thinking again of place and displacement, of all the molecules breathed by my Grandparents on their different continents, the Home Counties, the ice, amber and humidity of Estonia, the jungles of India merging into Shanghai and the always distant echo of Portugal. All of this is who I am and who I never will be. The woman adoring her new life in the Inner West and desperately missing the unexpected spaces of Western Sydney.
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