Chapter 4: R

Regret: 1. a troubled feeling or remorse over something that has happened, esp. over something that one has done or left undone 2. sorrow over a person or thing gone, lost, etc. 3. [pl.] a response declining an invitation: he sent his regrets before the deadline

In a time before we could dial smartly beyond rotary and coiled cable to retain ongoing connection through electric ribbons in the sky, I could only wonder during the in-between times about what you and your brothers did on your quotidian quests. The community connection of our life-givers that preceded our births and bonded us like blood family was rooted in the tropical soil of our ancestral provenance, then relocated, rediscovered, and reforged in snow and ice, eventually to be granted to us as the most precious of gifts. We carried it forward under their watchful and approving eyes, joyous in our jaunts when our forces joined like preternaturally irresistible magnetic attraction. From opposite sides of the city, we remained perpetually drawn to each other, constantly in search of assistance we needed for us to gaze upon each other in person, like the closing loop of a red ribbon knotting the fabric together for strength.

It was during one of those in-between times on a quotidian quest when you left me dockside for a telescopic engagement that rendered me out of focus, preoccupied with your own explorations with one of your two too young younger brothers. The curiosity of youth overpowered all caution as you and your friends cut through creek valley on the climb back to Tobermory, a shortcut that would cut you short in a fashion cold as the harshest of winter’s depths. On the day before heartstrings were set to strumming by lovebirds in song across the full surface of the turtle’s back, you dipped a toe into a mildly fuelled fulmination of nature’s temperate sunlit power. One false step along the muddy Yorkish shoreline of waterway caused you to give way. As friends gasped you grasped for reeds to grant you a moment to read the perils of your position, battered by the overflow of mid-February early onset of spring conditions. If only you could have sprung from the fresh(water) trap in which you’d been ensnared, then younger brother would not have rushed forward and attempted to release you from it with his own bare hands. He was no match for the power of the stream. It snuffed his flame of adrenaline with tragic ease, yanked a response too overwhelming for him to physically counteract, and swept both of you deep into its entangling fury.

My lifelong fear of rushing water came naturally and at a young age.

They could not find you through their collective eyes for three days after you had become shimmering spectre, the completeness of your vivified features washed away by the passage of tumultuous spring runoff. Your spirit relocated long before rediscovery of your form reforged lifeless by melted snow and ice, taking from us the most precious of gifts. The grief compounded by simultaneous discovery of fraternal frame beached nearby, infuriatingly expired long in advance of his best before date, blue as the ice, damp as snow, melted fully away. Your worlds went black in a creek as Black as us and as bleak as our presupposed prospects.

My household knew nothing of this until tube buzzed with ribboned lines flowing across its screen, where depicted anchor dropped a lead weight onto my entire being later that evening. At the top of the hour when they confirmed your final hour had transpired, I drowned my sorrows in wretched, uncontrollable sobs. Our ribbon irreparably torn, your middle brother eternally a hero, your youngest brother as sick for you as he was sick with fever that day, your family resigned to return you to the tropical soil of our ancestral provenance. We were both barely two digits in age and yet one of us had to be left behind with a permanent one at the front of our numbered years. When I look back, more than three decades later, I still search fervently for you in my mind’s eye.

But there you are and have remained all this time, with your brother, on the other side, veiled from view, eternally untouched by terrestrial testing, spectres beyond inquisition, spectators beyond watching.

I have forgotten how to approach you and cannot find you anymore.