5.

You and your brother were born in the same room, your father told me yesterday. He sat in the same chair, received both sons. Jonas was born into noise, the teams of doctors rushing, and finally the cry. Healthy. You were born into stillness. There was no hurry, no swarm. You were handed to him. He held you, proud as before.
He was an easy baby, and now at three, he surpasses every expectation. Our love for him is leaden, a stone around the heart, that ordinary fierce burden: let nothing harm him. But also light with joy, his ease of life. I wanted you to disperse the love, spread the fear thinner. More eggs, more baskets. Now I know the loss that I had felt lurking behind the infinite love.

We think you were darker, brown eyes and hair, from what we could see. A foil to the golden child. A complement, we imagined you together. How you would love him. We promised him you loved him already, heard his voice, and wanted to meet him. I know you knew him. You must have felt my happiness around him. How could you not have loved him? The night before I knew you had died, I went back to his room at night, held his hand as he slept. I had hoped it was a message of love to you both, a secret semaphore of hormone signals and hands. Did it reach you? I’ll tell you now: I love you.

Last night he asked me where you were. Gone, I said. You died and we won’t see you anymore. You will never meet corporeal, maybe another form. (Let that be so far away, knock on wood). We talked about death and aging, a version palatable to a confused child. I made a promise I can’t keep: you and I and Baba will all get old. But Baby Brother was not old, he says. I am at a loss, for words and for you, who was, indeed, not old. He is not sad, he says. But he was waiting. He drew a picture of you (before) at school, the one thing I can’t look at. And now he wonders and tries to make sense of things I want to shelter him from. Take me, I bargain, induct me into the sadness and confusion, but leave him unscathed. He is the reason we can still live after you, not just exist, every day he brings joy. But he (the love of him) is the worst part of the pain, brother to a ghost.