What does it mean to share a history that never became a relationship?

How many different kinds of relationship do I have? Can I have? Will I accept?

What does it mean to share a history that once may have been a relationship that then came to an end? Does it live on somewhere in the universe, without sight or touch or sound? Does it dissipate like a dying star?

There really is no common core, as it were, to the experience of growing into adulthood (functional, cellular) with those other people, beyond the shared experience of circumstance and incidence in our bewildered youth. As to ask, whose am I? Who loves me? And how?

There is no common core beyond the absolute certainty of materialism in the vacuum of anything else of soul, the perceived artifice of greeting cards that said to our eyes what was never said to our ears. We never heard that song. Not once.

She gave me a crafter’s photo gram consisting more of décor than of photo, of a history that belongs to her but not to me. They just aren’t my people, cellular pathways notwithstanding. Her way of seeing it and mine do not harmonize.

Function, function. Must all be reduced to function? What is enacted and spoken and accomplished? A clear-running brook may be a pretty thing to a dying man in the desert, but a pretty thing will not save him.

Function is not enough for me checking out groceries at the market. There is a human being there, deeper wider higher and unknown who plays a function for me, whom I must look in the eye and acknowledge. Function, function. Must all be reduced to function?

If the children sense I don’t like them, each one – heed them, each one – then all my knowledge and skill is for naught.

I ask again: am I a brother if no one found me as a brother? One whom they saw, and claimed, and knew? Is a chair a chair if no one is sitting there?

No, we never found each other, did not know how, now do not care to. This is how it is: sometimes, if you never did, you never will.

I am not a brother except to those to whom I am one, who choose me as one. I would, if I could, make a brother and sister out of everyone I see.

Because no one in my youth made one of me.

And sing them all to sleep in tears of heartbroken gratitude.