Kyle

Well, I wrote a letter to my brother today.

It's difficult to address the letter and next to his name put his inmate/ID #. My brother....a criminal. I'm asleep right. This has all been a bad dream. No Jessica, it's not a dream. It's life, real and true. All the ugliness and beauty get thrown together on one big canvas and the final art is what we see everyday.
I didn't write to him to tell him that everything's ok, that I'm proud of him or that if he needs anything I'll be here. No. I wrote him and instead I told him what I feel.

He didn’t get the sugar coated version. I told him, you’ve hurt people, you’ve let people down and you’ve misused people’s generosity over and over again.

Does this make me horrible? Does this make me a bad person? Maybe it does. Maybe it makes me selfish or coldhearted. Or maybe it makes me wise. It’s me. I’ve accepted that.

Some days, I have a brother, other days, I forget that I have one. I forget that I’m not an only child trying desperatley for my families approval. I forget that out there, outside of the world I’ve built around myself, there is a boy, who incidently now looks like a man, who has the same voice as me. Who used to idolize me as a child and then hate me as a teenager. A boy who I welcomed into life with open arms only to push him away not to long after because his presense didn’t quite suit my group.

I wrote to him, I love you. I have faith in you to become someone. I have hope. But all of this is nothing if he doesn’t make those choices. Everyone has a destiny but it's the choices that have a hand in leading you to it.

So now that I’ve taken time to acknowledge him, I’ll turn yet again back to my life. Where somedays I’ll remember that I have a brother and somedays I won’t. I don’t know when we’ll ever truly have a relationship. I've chosen the path that requires the least amount of effort. It's my choice, I live with it. I wonder what choices he'll begin to make and if in a round about way, both our choices will lead us closer together, or farther apart.