Burnt Pancakes

I sit and eat grease-burnt pancakes at a table you haven’t seen in a room you used to know. You kicked down the door once or twice, I heard. At that time you didn’t know my face or the fact that I would be a girl not a boy like you wanted.
I climbed trees!
I played with toy guns!
I wanted to be a Top Gun pilot!
It wasn’t enough? I wasn’t enough.
To keep you happy. To keep you sane.
I feel the weight of the massive door against my palm. I push it open to walk along the bay and think of your birthday and how I should care.

I eat burnt pancakes covered with butter and syrup and break off pieces of blackened bacon to chew quickly as I talk about you. I don’t want to talk. I resist, I stall, the words building up behind my brown eyes (like yours) and my freckles (you blamed them on her). I have your chin, her frame. Your temper, her passive aggressiveness. The stories begin to tumble out and a mixture of sadness and pain fall onto the sticky plate in front of me. I want to wipe them away, compost it all into something more beautiful.
I think of eating tomatoes as a child, gagging on the slimy seeds encapsulated in blood red flesh (your favorite color, your favorite thing to grow) trying to like something you said I should. I told you I hated them. You took it personally. I couldn’t help being a child. Honest, blunt, unaware that each sullen word, each action could affect the child in you. I now see that you were just a young boy wrapping himself in a well worn blanket, shielding himself from words falling like blunt arrows at his feet. A thin shell between you and the hurt.
We were both on guard and defenseless.

I swipe my finger across the ceramic plate, think of mornings in the mountains, woodsmoke pouring from the pipe chimney, burnt pancakes in a cast iron pan and a smile on your face.
Hiking all morning, trout fishing all afternoon. Those were the only times I really I saw you.
I think of the blue jay that followed me for miles through the woods of the high sierras years after you died. Hopping branch to branch, singing out as I passed, you seemed happy then too.

I wash the last crumbles of bacon and soggy bits of dough from the plate. I think of all the times you grounded me for not washing the dishes before rushing off to school, the residue of toasty dust and jam on white plates stolen from IHOP. Of how helpless and lonely you must have felt as we all left the house, all left you alone. We thought you needed space, that we annoyed you. How could I have known that a blanketing of love, of understanding, of quiet empathy could mimic the peace of that wood cabin and childish (crucial) need for comfort?

I wash and dry the plate. My stories for the evening are done. You curl up once again in the corners of my mind where you know you are safe and can visit me (without yelling, without crying, without arrows) in dreams.