[P] a lousy bunch

[Hagar]

HAGAR IESHAN

Dust yourself off, girl, keep your chin up
You wanna hold a gun but they made you a pinup

A

utumn days are spinning away into winter ones like grains of sand. I've always thought it was strange, how the desert both changes and doesn't, a new shape every day but all its old bones are the same: the dunes, the canyon, the city, going on endlessly, crumbling and rebuilding and crumbling again like any of us were meant to be here at all.

Then there is we, a family crumbling, too, like so much sandstone. I wonder if this is our fate, to return to the sand that had borne us, to fall to pieces until we are no more than another old bone buried out in the desert.

I would never admit it, but to think this makes me sort of sad. It would not be so hard, to embrace each other like brothers and sisters. It would not be so hard to look in someone's eye and feel something that is not our carefully cultivated apathy or our tepid politeness or our-- anything.

I think this is why I prefer the servants, watching them cook in the kitchen when I rise for the morning, sit among the baking nut bread and oranges sliced into halves and pretend that they see me for what I am and what I am not, which is more than I can expect from any of us. (Myself included, though I loathe to admit it.)

I don't expect to see him when I do. It is like looking at a stranger, like there is someone that is not my brother skulking through the hall with his eyes--too blue now, blue enough to make me feel sick sometimes--far off and distant. He looks like one of our statues, I think, something unreal examining something equally unreal, like he's looking into a mirror and not at stone carved to suggest something like him rather than be it.

I didn't realize I had gotten so used to the estate without him. I didn't realize that I missed him, like I miss all of them, until I am looking at Adonai and I do not recognize the man he now is.

"What are you doing?" I call over his shoulder. My voice is quiet, and smooth, but I don't know if it's to keep from startling him or to keep from being heard at all. "I feel like I haven't seen you in years." 

In spite of my disdain for that practiced patience, the faces carefully drawn into inoffensive lines, I realize mine is one of these, now.

I wonder if it's because he feels like a stranger.

@Adonai