Coming Clean

Wind Runner

Right. A story.

I don’t think this one is so much a story as much as a relation … a glimpse into me.

I have been thinking a lot of my brother. Tonight because I watched a show called Brat Camp – he’s a field counselor at another camp that is similar to the show. It makes me really proud knowing he’s doing something so good for people – for kids who are at the best places in life to change. When I got married, I thought of him as a part of us was being put up on the shelf – a time of being and togetherness that was slipping away except for the occasional get togethers and merriment. When I was in college, I thought of him because of a lot of hardships he was going through in highschool and his first years in college – and always admiring how he stuck to things, never giving in to the pressures of the powers that be, never succumbing to the depression I knew that gnawed away at his heart.

As a younger boy (most people will say there is still very much boy in me) I loved the idea of flying. I thought it was great … if I were to be an animal, it would either be a wolf who could speed through the forests or some bird of prey above it all with a keen eye on everything. Yet thinking back on my life, I can’t ever think of taking a moniker for myself that involved the wind, air, or flying – no, such names were only for my brother.

I use to make up stories for my brother and me. They were the kinds of stories most if not all young boys loved – adventure stories. They generally always featured two heroes, and in most and certainly the best stories, the heroes names were Fireball and Tornado. Incidentally, my brother and I each had a hermit crab – mine named Fireball and his named Tornado. What shocking coincidence. I can’t tell you what adventures were had … only that at the time my brother and I thought the adventures were of the grandest and best told sort … and the stories would not be worth half or even a quarter of their value if the heroic pair were not together.

Later in life, when I went away to college, I adopted the handle mb10 for online play – mb10 a shortened version of monkey boy 10 (too long and irrelevant to explain here). My games of choice in those days were Command-n-Conquer and Descent. My brother fell in love watching me play Descent, and soon he began to want to take turns in the online world. For this purpose, we (or rather I) developed the handle WindLaufer – a german rendition of WindRunner. More often than not, this was shortened to just Wind. He quickly became better than me – a minor ego bruising that I’m more proud of than anything (save his bad temper that also developed during that time).

In the core of me is the idea of my brother. When I think of him as I do tonight, that part of me stirs, lifts, and begins to fly. I become exhilirated, high, emotional. There’s a lot of good things about me, and I cherish those things that my brother and I have together. In a lot of ways, he’s the reason married life is so easy for me – being comfortable with someone, being open with someone, being free with someone. …and so I often find myself missing him yet being proud of him wherever he may be.

My spirit runs in the turbulent winds of the world … and it is with my brother I learned how to fly … and whose company and memory brings glimpses of what must be the winds of the aeries of paradise.