How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

I have no resolutions, nor any half-conclusions that might help me close this chapter in my life; that’s just not how any of this works. I do know that I feel freer, today, than I did before—freer (if not fully freed) to never again be any brother’s keeper. Freer to abandon that role, and abandon the place that figure carved out in my person, in my life, in my story. This is not to erase that place; nothing I ever do in this life will accomplish that. But to simply leave the grave untended—something I will have to stumble on, every now and then: in the middle of a laugh with my cousins, or a movie about siblings, or having to safeword out of a kiss with a man I love who has never, ever hurt me. Like living near the field where a mine once went off; having to learn by heart how to trace a daily route around that place’s quieted craters. Living with it, in other words. In whatever words there are that day.