firsts

eleven

He told me everything over the weekends. About himself. About his family. It was hard for him, I knew, talking about his history but he had to let it out to someone, anyone. It was not a burden that a single person could bear alone.

His brother was his half-sibling, sharing only one parent: his father. Before their father's marriage, their father had an one-night stand with a woman that he did not know. And from that one night, Adam's brother, Sean, was born. Sean's mother life was irrevocably changed after that. Once a bright college student, she had to drop out of school and work so she could support Sean. As a waitress, she could barely manage for the both of them especially after her parent's had abandoned her. They were a incredibly religious family, part of an obscure cult that disallowed the members to have sexual relationship before their marriage. Sean's mother often found such rules to be restrictive, suffocating, denying them in her own rebellious way.

When she found that she was pregnant with Sean she couldn't bear the thought of abortion. And when she gave birth to him, she still wondered if her decision was the right one. She cried at night, Sean had told Adam, but she tried to hide her tears from him. Sean had always remembered a loving mother, but a weak and broken one as well. When she passed away young, she told him the truth of his birth, she had also left him with the details of his true father that she had found when investigating about him.

Sean didn't have anywhere to go. He had visited his mother's relative once, but it always left nightmares to his young self. Their looks of scorns, dislike, and judgement was clear on their eyes, they didn't even try to hide it from him or his mother. He never saw them again. And he thought that those eyes would not haunt him again.

Sean was unfortunately wrong. Throughout most of his adolescence Adam's mother had always watched him with cold, disapproving eyes. When Sean knocked on Adam's door and told the truth, Adam's father believed him. Adam's mother hated his father from thereon, and there was no hope for a younger sibling for Adam.

So Sean grew up with Adam, as a brother he didn't know that he could truly love or understand. But still, Sean was his blood, or so Adam thought was the reason why he always was curious about him. Sean knew what pain was as well as with loneliness and loss. When Adam found himself lost in the world, it was Sean who in the end was there for him. He wasn't always next to him though, distant and aloof in his own world. But he picked up Adam's damaged pieces when he could-like an older brother.

I listened patiently until he finished. As he said his last words and leaned his head on me, we both ruminated over what he said. Thought of the past, the future, and felt the present.