I totally didn’t mean for this blog to be all about JC, but since I keep thinking about it, and I’m not talking to anyone about it, I may as well put it down SOMEWHERE that J.C….
… would’ve turned 22 last Wednesday. Yeah, that’s all. Happy Birthday, J.C.! You see I grew up Catholic, and my religion taught me that after death, we fly around the internet reading web logs. Not quite what I had in mind for the afterlife, either. But who are we to question the pope? We are as the dust beneath his jeweled slippers, and I bet he’d tell us that to our faces.
Here’s a poem of J.C.’s that I’m figuring he wouldn’t mind me posting somewhere, b/c he had it published in his school’s lit mag. He and I were in Malaga, Spain with our parents for a week, and they wanted to go to a flamenco dinner show one night that J.C. and I were just not feeling. We were at that point in The Family Vacation where everyone just needs a break from family time. J.C. and I had instructions to stay in the room or down in the sort of "rec center" of the place we were staying… it would be night soon, we were in a foreign country with no way to contact each other, so Mom’s safety concerns for us weren’t totally unreasonable… but as soon as Mom & Papa were out, J.C. and I put our bathing suits on and snuck out to the beach. We’d walked on the beach together in daylight with our parents following somewhere behind us– and it was always fun, I’d been living in CA for 2 years at that point and every time I saw him it was like talking to a different, older version of the kid I’d grown up with– but it was different walking alone. And at night. We watched the sunset, and as the moon rose and grew bright, all of the stones and shells in the waters at our feet became magical. And we decided we would take them all home, loading the pockets of J.C.’s swim trunks with our loot, cradling wet rocks in the fronts of our T-shirts like we were kangaroos and they was our babies. "We’re gonna come home with like GIANT GARBAGE BAGS of ROCKS" he said, wide-eyed, pantomiming gathering the whole beach into his arms and trying to bag it in frenzied armloads. I laughed– as I always laughed, as just knowing that he wanted me to laugh was always enough to make me laugh– and thought about how I was always going to have this memory, that there on a beach in Spain I was probably more connected to my little brother than I could have been if we’d just reunited back home, and I hoped that it was special for him, too.
Later that night, I saw his back through the window to our balcony. He was sitting alone, all of the rocks he’d collected spread out on the table in front of him. Just sitting back in the white plastic chair, lanky adolescent arms on the armrests, the round white moon over him and over the sea beyond him. I thought of stepping out too, but decided not. We would have a lot more time together, to talk and to laugh. For that night I left J.C. to his thoughts, drank tea alone, and wrote a note to a friend on a napkin from a restauraunt we’d been to. I stuck my head out to say goodnight to J.C., and held myself back from stepping out and hugging him. I heard him come in and get ready for bed pretty soon after. The next morning, all of his rocks were spread over the bathroom counters and around the back and edge of the sink. He had washed them all, and set them out to dry. It was such a beautiful, carefully laid-out scene that I took a photo of it with my huge, steel-body SLR that I still have to this day.
Rocks from Spain
me and my sister
or rather
my sister and I
would take walks on the beach
and we’d talk
about our parents
and some random this and that
while I hopped around in the sand like
an idiot
trying to grip my toes and stay balanced
as the Mediterranean would
roll in from the sunset
and make a fool of me
while my sister laughed at me
and along the way
I’d find these rocks
glistening in the tide
like jewels
and I picked one up
for each friend I figured would appreciate
that sort of thing
later at night
sitting on the balcony
overlooking the sea
I laid all the rocks out on a table
the moonlight reflecting off of each one
like a display case
a display case of jewels
I saw all of my friends
and I actually missed home
November 21st, 2005 at 3:51 pm
hi Aileen, just KuyaCris here; i’m glad you “waste time” here instead of always doing all your work all the time ;^P
i don’t even really have anything to say, only that sometimes i don’t even know how to talk about J.C. in our family b/c i don’t even want to venture down that road too far b/c it’s kinda too hard to miss him too much and also to feel how broken it still feels that he moved on before us…
i’m sorry you had to be away from home when he left, but i wanted to tell you that i wish i had been as close to him as you were; i think being “on the ends” in our family had us maybe not quite as close as you were/are to each of us, being in the middle… though i do know that as we all did get a little older and grew more into ourselves, i *did* feel that he and i were like bookends with you in the middle… the two cruz boys with their hot sis between, and anybody out there who wanted you had to get through the two of us first! LOL hello, can we say a little bit overprotective, here? LOL but that’s how ates and kuyas are, i guess…
J.C. was much more realistic about you, i remember he and i would hang out in his room and i would bitch to him about people in your life that you had told us about that i thought were kinda losers (not quite, LOL, but y’know, i get all hot-headed and worked up), and J.C. would just kinda shrug and remind me that he was sure you knew what you were doing…
it’s like you said; the five of us were right, and four will never feel whole… and sometimes the hardest times i think are when we *are* all together, b/c it’s then that it’s apparent to me that one of us is missing, and how it’s not like it was, it’s not right like it was, it’s not WRONG now, but it’s different, it’s not right…
but i guess it is what it is, and it’s not terrible awful, and i know J.C’s with us inside our own hearts, but it’s just kinda emptier, lonelier, or less fun w/o him here the way you and i and noel and everybody else is here..
and things happened so fast; JC left and Noel came (though for you, he’d already been around for months)… i hope J.C. is tickled by Noel and all his funny little stories… i hope i can be a good uncle to him, you KNOW J.C. would’ve been..
and you’ve always been the best sister (not that i have anything to compare it too, but I JUST KNOW haha…)… i just wish J.C and i had gotten the chance to be brothers… i miss him a lot that way…
i wish i knew how to miss him with mom, but her grief is like kinda private, it seems… i dunno…
and papa, i dunno, it’s hard to just be sad with papa sometimes, b/c he’s always got an answer when sometimes you’re not asking a question or posing a problem, you’re just sharing thoughts… but i guess that’s how he grieves, too, by trying to fix it or fix the problem of having to go on w/o J.C. around…
i dunno, maybe someday we’ll all be there with you in california, and maybe someday you and i will sit down together someday and just kinda cry and miss him together…
i always have a picture of you and noel in my wallet with me, and a picture of J.C… and i tell people that i have one brother and one sister, and also that i’m an uncle…
well, i just cried a little bit and it wasn’t no big deal but i feel better b/c i can’t remember the last time i cried and i guess the scientists are right, even just a little bit really can make you feel a little better, just letting it out and moving on…
so now that i’ve rambled aimlessly, i’ll say that i hope you’re doin OK and not feelin too too sad lately, and that if you are, if there’s a way J.C. can somehow help, i hope he does… b/c of course he would want to and would if he could… i wonder if going on ahead has kinda made *him* the older brother now…
the rest of your life is a long time to miss someone, and i’m sad we can’t share our lives with each other as we go on b/c he ended his…
but i love him, like i love you, and i love noel, and like we put on J.C.’s marker,
love bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things…
sappy but true…
i guess it makes sense it would be so hard to miss him so much…. it would only make sense, that’s how love is… lucky for us, love can grieve and still go on, and do both at the same time, it’s strong like that…