I'd like to think that when I left home, it was for the greater good, of not only myself but everyone else in my family. In reality, it was me that probably suffered more for it than anyone else.
My family is too large for its house and confines, and used to be happy- but that was honestly so far back that most of us don't remember when.
I have two sisters and three brothers. I'm the sixth, youngest, and by far the biggest disappointment in comparison to all of them.
My oldest sister, Lily is in her thirties now- and a very esteemed lawyer. No one but me finds it funny that she never needed law school to learn how to lie- she did live in the same house as the rest of us.
My oldest brother- and twin to Lily- is Rae, who's extremely cool if not his tendency to treat me like a little kid, regardless of my age. He's a musician;a guitarist in a band. (Which is an entirely more respectable career than being a lawyer).
My other sister, Robin is a corporate big wig for an international negotiations company- she can speak like a trillion languages, and say what she means in each. She's pretty cool when she's not jetting around for work and on her cell phone,which isn't often.
They're all so much older than me though, so getting along with them was always easy- I never had to deal with them- they didn't live with us..
For the most part I grew up with two of my brothers in the house, and my sister before her booming career.
My favorite brother is closest to me in age- but its our older one, Abram that I've got a love/hate relationship with. He made a career of being in the Army, and even went to war. I'm entirely against the war, and always have been, but he has always been for it. He's a pretty typical boy, I guess you could say. I can remember him with tanks and G.I. Joe's, trying to get Asher to join him as he decimated a village of twig and rock people.
Asher on the other hand, was an a-typical boy, for he wanted nothing more than to be a part of nature and be at peace. For that, he and I were always two peas in a pod- despite the age difference of three years. Poor Bram, who didn't understand what it was like to feel free outside, without having to construct and destruct something.
As we got older, Bram did hit that super destructive phase, where out of anger he'd go outside and destroy our artwork and tell Asher that he was a pansy and a girl, that he wished for another brother. Asher's only a year younger than him, and they were practically twins when they were really young, pretty much before I was born.
That's all different now though. Bram was killed the last time he went to war.
Mom never got over it, Dad's been AWOL for years anyway, and it didn't even take the death of his middle son to bring him back. It's been a few years that Bram's been dead, but time stopped in my mother's house, his death caused my mother's life to cease living, as well as Asher's- for he still lives in the time warp that is the family house.
It's suffocating to be there. Bram's death still hangs in the air. He's a ghost within those walls, and Mom's not far from joining him, from her depression, and drinking. She's miserable on the inside, but on the outside she's still a busybody homemaker, setting the table for kids who no longer visit, never mind stay for dinner.