This is my brother.
He is thirteen.
He has darker browns.
Bigger ears,
and Greener eyes.
He's wearing black,
a shirt too big.

He's holding a donut to our heads.
We are smiling.
He's holding my
neck in place,
showing me the camera.

Parents tell you
what you're suppose to see.
Not me.
He's telling me to look.
I've never been good at
paying attention.

My fathers holding
the camera.
My mothers still
at work.
Brian is hiding
in his room.

Mark is here,
with me.
And this moment is
wholesome.

I will always remember the curve of streambank drive. The way the definitive black Pontiac would make any neighbour incapable of getting home. Always sitting there blocking the entrance of my street. Swerving into oncoming traffic was a chore, but something about it made you feel alive.
Charlotte and Hannah Tarr's house was 37 and a half steps from Saginaw. Their driveway was winding and inviting to my gaze. I was never far. I remember when I ran away from home at 4am on an unusual Sunday morning impulse. I spent a whole hour throwing on my warmest red fleece sweater and packing a backpack full of Dunkaroo's and fuzzy childish socks. I went out the back creeky tin door from my basement, and made my way.
Charlotte was asleep, and her blinds were drawn. I spent another hour tapping light enough on the glass to wake her and not her dad Bruce. She never woke up.
I ended up walking through the crisp morning to Woodeden park. It was only 5minutes from me, but I knew it could be a dangerous venture. As I walked slowly and quietly down the street, I had passing strangers on runs question why a small little girl might be up at 5am:
"Is there anything I can do for you sweetie? Are you lost?"
"I'm okay thanks", and I ran. Just like that my attempt to prove a point to my parents was over. I ran all the way back home.
My mom asked how I got up so early and I told her I was outside testing the weather.
"It's cold Laura. I could have told you that."
"Sorry."
"Go get ready for church. DigaDiga is going to be over any minute."
DigaDiga is my grandpa. He smells like Nutella and has a button nose. He's not quick like he used to be with my 20 year old brothers, but he chases me around and yells DigaDiga until I lose a shoe. He's the only person I like.
"Is everything okay Laura?"
"I'm okay thanks."

I'm here at Girl Guide camp sitting by Lakelet Lake watching trees and water in a tête-à-tête, and I am simply an observer. Dull humming surrounds me and fills the air, pushing against my light golden locks that appear before the end of each bright summer. I am younger here, sixteen again and pulsing with light, evoking and echoing spirit. My legs are light too as I approach the edges of a tall birch dock that make the water seem like a steady pool without gleam. I find myself plummeting forward into it, water filling my ears and holding me close. The jump is always the worst part of this lake, the cold lasting, but it's a jump I've made before and it has to be sudden. You can sit there and deliberate the temperature, but you know you have to go in, so you surprise yourself. I quickly feel airy and steady once I make it, you do not need control for this. The water stays timid and vulnerable, I have good intentions. The breeze caresses my face, like a crack between the jet way and the jet, you smell the air blasting through the seam and you have your goodbye, touching the frame of the plane as an omen. My mom does not romanticize this moment, anxiety ridden and terrified of flight, but she touches the plane anyways. There's something to be said about being so sure. Is it romantic to know everything? I don't think so. People who are mostly sure are mostly boring, or maybe those people are floating somewhere too. My best friend Olivia appears before me, she sits perched on the dock and dips her toes in the green. I ask her if she can see anything going on through the lake. She responds, "nothing really". "Just old cottages and old people. Lily pads too".  I look an arm's length away as she said they were resting and find nothing, she must have lied, she knows I love Monet. I keep swimming out a bit further but can't make anything out. No houses, no sweet leathery old people with sun spots, just sun and whispering willows. My arms eventually grow tired and I have no choice but to steady on my back. I lay there, and I float a minute longer, just long enough to acknowledge that I feel nothing in this water. I can't even disassociate where my hands and the water meet, but they're shaking hands anyways.

Your handwriting is ******* me the ******* and every time your scrawny little fingers manage to get through a mediocre sentence your black ink smudges across the page like a baseball to a bat. What a terrible ******* comparison. How are you ever going to make it as a hobbyist writer. Hobbyist isn't even a word probably. If you had a second to not think about every single ******* thing all at once you'd probably be able to get through a single prose and thought. But you never could, so why start today? James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness was at least poetic, yours is just frantic and scared like a child lost in a grocery store for a whole minute without their mother. Speaking of, when are you going to tell her to stop emailing you job applications like a service agent. You have a voice. A small one. But a voice. And so do I. Did you think the author name drop was enough to seem like you might know something about writing, because you don't. Rest assured who's ever reading this knows that now. When we get home you better start your laundry because if I have to stay up till 3AM again your going to make me disassociate. That's what you want isn't it? Maybe if you're lucky I'll remind you about that time a centipede ran across your pillows by 1am. You think I'm your OCD speaking - I thought you didn't believe in labels. Whatever think what you want, I'm just a passenger. Kinda like that Black Mirror episode with the girl - you know the one - cause, well, your me and you have to know. What's it like to have a conversation with yourself you sick ****. Oh you just became conscious of your own voice reading this in your head. My bad - actually I'm not even mad about it. Your mad.

He outgrew me like a pair of jeans. Spun too long in the wash on high, left running hot and sunken in. I am loud and my jeans a gentle blue. Vibrant orange t-shirts don't go with dull blue jeans. My lips are blue too, thanks to ignoring my mom's eager growl to wear more layers on Toronto's lasting cold advisory days.
"Laura you better be wearing that scarf I bought you", she says sternly shaking a grey wool scarf in my face. A toddler to a raddle. I never liked the itch of wool scarves anyways, they always make my hair turn up and out of my head. Waving hello to passing strangers untamed.
He took his time that day to notice each and every hair, as we walked along the quiet Trinity Bellwoods area. Pristine and clean red-brick townhomes guide the sharp sidewalk, keeping you on Queen St. for hours, whether you liked it or not. The whole morning, he kept reaching out to pull my tall hairs and inspect its frilled mechanics with close sharp eyes. Feet pushing wildly into the ground, pulling my head to his forearm on the street side, "Your hair looks like it's trying to escape". He says while stepping across the moldy Toronto ***** cracks. I retort away, my hair snapping back up and out, "Yeah, I know my hair's prone to static, it's this ******* scarf, just don't be a **** about it". He pushes me away and adjusts his new black leather boots. Some pre-authenticated Doc's bought at Eatons.
I never seem to listen to the washing labels on things. They say, "wash with like-colours in cold", but I don't own a **** like-colour. I admire a hot wash that makes denim skin-tight like a millennial scuba suit. Britney and Justin's denim-on-denim-on denim power move from 2001 reincarnated - I just don't have that kinda confidence.
The grass today seems confident. Luscious and green, a Pleasantville with White Teeth Teens. That's a good Lorde song. If he heard it today he'd remember the line, "Their studying business, I study the floor", because it's authentic and mundane, like most conversations go.
I've stared at a few floors. One word too many escaping in process, running from my thick lips that tear around corners and cliché's like a marathon. My jeans too, with one stitch too many, now past a recovery point. I kept kneeling down on the wet pavement trying to gather myself and always tear a new one.
One time I took him to the Port Credit Busker fest in 2012 and him and I listened to Vampire Weekend on the paved stone walls that guide the walkways off Lake Ontario. "I like them their cool", his voice affirming into the moist summer winds. We continue on watching the street magicians yelling from afar with tall black caps disappearing behind fixed red velvet curtains that pull apart in good beats. We finally find a place to sit and relax, I lean back to hear the ****** of Obvious Bicycle as the magician finally pulls his curtain.  Grabs my **** firmly. His thick jeans dragging against the rigid pavement to catch his prey. It left a mark.
I stand the next morning on the same shore but with new jeans, before my early soccer classes I teach. Just kneeling to allow the waves to break apart in my hands and push away, my cleats stinging my cuts and molding over. I wait as if I expect some varied response in this set.
But here it is, plain water. Nothing extraordinary. Here I am with plain jeans and another grass stain. Or maybe, another layer of lint in his pocket. Lost from a tissue forgotten in the wash when your too busy enjoying the better parts of life. The velvet curtains, the climactic choruses. I stare at the floor.

Head torn against itchy familiar grasslands, I lie in a field of decaying cow ****. Sixty years ago, Great Uncle Adolf owned upwards of 8 large cows that would roam on the endless back green property of our cottage in the Kawartha Lakes. Hazy recollections from distant Easter's tells me at least three must have died eventually due to a heatwave in the early 90's. Their skulls sitting in the back ***** overgrown pond for a time, sweet yellow daffodils and sharp wild strawberry's framing it into place. When my brothers found the skulls, they spent an afternoon sulking and moping out of character on the rocky shoreline of Balsam Lake. They aimed their ruthless rocks at stinky dead catfish floating peacefully, throwing for every pang of 12-year-old pain they felt towards the somber history. When I found out, I must have just eaten my Lindt bunny and shrugged unimpressed, but my mom would have said I cried.
I was young back then, but now that I'm a full-fledged adult, I sympathize with the greens for enduring endless winters and **** storms that I haven't. My cottage has been taunted but never shaken by the continuous tornado warnings that curse the northern lakes, but she aged steadily in spite. Waves of modernism guiding her burgundy wood panels. Air conditioning, flat screens, and the down feather pillows my grandma collected and sewn for each sunken crisp bedframe before me, replaced by industrialized cold artificial fluff from Ikea. Now that I think about it, I didn't really mind breaking my neck. This cottage lacks truth, but gains in history, my favourite place on planet earth, all greens, blues, and natural floral arrangements that put the edible ones to shame.
There's dirt and mud here too but I always choose to be blissfully ignorant. If I ever ask my mum about the shambled green roofed tin cottage on the corner of the always pebbled School and Omega Roads, and their Jesus warning signs I get kissed lips and back glares. There's more to this old country town than they put on. There's a story waiting here.
Right now, I feel it's roots on the phone with you Jordan. Because you only remind me of my grandpa when I'm here, his tall slender frame, strong jaw and warm charm that makes old women gawk and causing shrill laughter in the presence of ripe anger. He didn't let my mom wear nail polish cause it was for ******, guess I'm from a line of ****** huh?
This one time at Christian camp they tried to teach me to meditate by picturing Jesus with me in my favourite place. It was so weird seeing Jesus sitting perched in this tall birch tree, looking at me, looking at the old broken down barn that waits for me to smile back. The sky orange, celestial, fiery. I sort of wish you were here and not my mental perception of Jesus, he sort of freaks me out. But in this open field where you could walk 8 miles in any direction and find grass and only grass. Sun and only sun. Trees and mostly trees, sometimes poison ivy too if you took the wrong turns. I am surely free.
I know all the turns with you too. But that's only because I'd done them over and over again, and still I'll face a dead end. I'm not sure we can solve each other like my Papa's Sunday morning crosswords, we're more like his raspberry jam with burnt toast. But I do know that I want to have more greens like the ones in this field. Build more pillows, farms, and people. I want more pastel pinks from the cheeks left kissed in the fresh mornings on Lake Ontario where our teen selves and adult selves get caught up in some interlope of history that isn't supposed to happen. Another Kate and Leopold situation, a timeless love analogy gone too long.
Today in this field it is peaceful, when the tall grass blows with steady patient wind, it feels like your soft lips. When the birds chirp annoyingly overhead, and I hear my brothers laughing loudly from the brown rusted dock, it feels like your aged smile.
I think Monet got it right when he said, "I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers", because without you I couldn't paint these words all day.