Posted June 10th, 2003 by Michelle

I’m cleaning my house which always leaves my mind to clear out as well. There are things that won’t leave me right now, things from my past that hover in the back of my mind, brought forward with great clarity if the smallest thing calls them. Right now I’m thinking about when my brother Sean got his laptop stolen. We were all living in Los Angeles, Ian, Sean, and I, and my mom was in town. Sean and my mom were loading something into my apartment late at night, even though I wasn’t there, and one of the loads was too heavy. So Sean put his army-issue backpack on the ground as he carried up a load. My mom asked him if he should leave it there, and he said it would be fine.

Minutes later, Sean came down, and his bag had disappeared. He saw, just down the block, a black-skinned man on a bike pumping madly away, Sean’s bag on his back. Sean screamed and took off after the man, running like hell on a knee badly in need of surgery. The man got away. My mom says that Sean stopped and howled. That howl, even though I didn’t hear it, haunts me. That my brother was so injured. This loss came in the same year as the disintegration of his marriage, and one of his worst financial years as well. I think of my brother at the end of the dark block, hands on his throbbing knee, watching all of the writing he’d done in years pedal away into the darkness.

I’m left to wonder what kind of person would steal that bag. And I rest just slightly more easy, knowing that my brother now sleeps next to his new fiancée, just a few feet away from the newest Mac laptop on the market. It’s just too easy to think back in Los Angeles, to think, what if we hadn’t left, what if we were still so far away from New York. Maybe I’m still back there, howling in the darkness, wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do now.