Reunion Over Good-Byes

Today, I learn why my brother will sometimes say to me “Ciao, Juan” pronounced "zh-whan"-- one syllable.

Years ago we were friends—me sitting in his room, talking to him, he driving me to school every morning.

Four years away, we are like those friends again. He has taken me to his favorite restaurant/fast-food joint—the one where, man of simple tastes, he says he wants to have his wedding reception. Crown Burger, it is called. He brought me here to say good-bye, before I leave and it is as if we are not friends again.

Tired for reasons I don’t remember, I say to him “Tell me a story” over my veggie burger and onion rings with fry sauce.

“What kind of a story?”

“A mission story.”

These years are the lost years—the years we became not friends. Those years we “grew apart”—literally growing up 5,000 miles from each other. Today, I ask him to tell me about those years.

Though he does not know it, my brother is an excellent story-teller, and soon I am encapsulated by different air—warm and sprinkled with salt. The booth where we sit flickers like a lightbulb and becomes a cobbled, Portuguese street, the urbane adjacent to the antique. Even his words are laced with the promise of a distant countryside and culture I never knew.

He tells me stories of Juan, the man who acted like a boy, who always hung around. The man whose father left him on a street corner, whose brain he used as a pincushion for drugs. My brother saw him so often saying goodbye to Juan became a reflex. Now, when he says good-bye to me in Portuguese, he cannot help but say “Ciao, Juan.” Though Juan’s story is sad, we are laughing because he is funny for reasons I do not remember.

We are just laughing, and the booth comes back. Now we are two friends laughing in a booth, so hard I fear fry sauce will come out my nose like peach snot. Right now, those lost years don’t matter anymore. We are two siblings, friends, laughing over stories and peach-colored snot.