keeping a brother, losing a friend

My brother and I don't talk about just anything. We talk about everything, except what we went through together. We talk to fill the silence, because the memories would fill it up, and we don't talk about it.

I remember hearing something, half asleep, cracking my eyes, seeing a flash of movement.
Impact. A bright orange flash in darkness. Darkness.
I can hear myself screaming for help.
A thought - maybe if I stop screaming I won't get hit anymore - okay.
I stop screaming.
I can see again.

We'd been camping on a trail off an abandoned road at the northern end of Humbolt Redwood State Park. It was almost 8 am. We were sleeping in after the first day of our bike tour down to San Fransisco. 3 guys jumped us. The first must have run up and kicked me in the head. When I came to I was crawling backwards away from him, standing over me.

"We've got money; take whatever, just leave us alone." I direct them to the money.
"Tie them up," he says.

The guy who tied me up was vicious, hogtying me so tightly my left hand was numb for 4 days. The guy who tied Shandin up, well, it's ambiguous...

"If you tie us up and leave us here, no one comes down here, we could starve to death," said Shandin.
"Who gives a fuck. We should just kill you," said the guy who'd been beating me up.

But they guy who was tying Shandin up said, "well, we'll come back later and untie you."
What? Doesn't make much sense. But what we know is that he did a poor job of tying Shandin. He was out of the ropes ten minutes after they left, untied me, and we ran to the highway to flag down help.

I was 19 when this happened. Shandin is 6 years older then me. He'd always been a great older brother, taking me out to interesting places, exposing me to consciousness-raising culture. But friction had started. I was becoming an adult and wanting more of a peer relationship. But I felt dependent on him, and he felt like he needed to take care of me, but also wanted to empower me.

If the assault was anyone's fault I'd say it was mine. We accidently hung our food bag in a place that made it like a beacon. Shan noticed this, but when I said, oh, it's fun, he went with it out of a desire to empower me. You could say it was his fault for not trusting the discerning judgement of his experience and moving the food bag despite my protest, but that feels like a stretch.

It seems like Shandin couldn't help feeling like it was his fault, blaming himself. But then it was also my fault, and he would blame me. He never said any of this to me directly.

I never blamed him. But it was an eye opening experience. I realized how dependent I'd been on others to create my experience, and how I'd put myself in mortal danger by not taking responsibility for myself. After the experience I returned home to Twin Oaks Community, a safe community full of support for healing. Shandin was re-entering the mainstream, having just left East Wind Community, and didn't get the space and time and support. He was about to begin work forming a new Ecovillage on the west coast.

Once I tried to talk about the experience with him. I wanted to share about my healing process. I think this was a poor approach on my part, given the opportunities I had that he didn't. He didn't show much interest, and I quickly dropped the subject. It was still to painful for either of us to face with eachother. We have yet to revisit it.

In the years since, Shandin's ecovillage project struggled, faltered, and finally fell apart. I was strongly engaged at Twin Oaks, and had become part of a successful poly-family (three parents with one child), which is something Shandin had always wanted. During one visit I remember him saying to me, "I can't do this without you." Whoa! Recoil - when did I become the big brother here? I'd worked hard to become a strong, independent adult, which included distancing myself from my family for a couple years, living the width of the continent apart. I needed to not need anyone, and I'd gotten there. Now I discovered that they needed me - a totally foreign concept. And, with Shandin, there was still this horrid experience we'd shared and never talked about.

I couldn't deal. I simply didn't respond to the efforts Shandin made to reach out to me. He felt rejected, legitimately so. Things have been strained the last few years.

Now, all of a sudden they feel relaxed. Shandin's goals in life have changed considerably, in a direction I can't help him with. He doesn't expect anything from me, nor I from him. It makes it easier. The day before yesterday, sitting together with our father, Dale, peeling the garlic harvest for almost 9 hrs, it went by so quickly. We talked psychological theory, gossiped about Twin Oaks, shared about our confusion about relationships and what we want. It was the best part of family - the familiarity and comfort, the ease of relating. And now, with our lives on such different tracks, our past issues and experiences, the muck and darkness, it doesn't matter anymore. Our involvment and investment in each other doesn't warrant talking about it.

But if we keep relating to each other on the surface level, even a few layers in, how long will it be until the cores of who we are are elsewhere, and the engagement will become dissatisfying, more obligatory then desired? Should I go ahead and be the big brother and say, Shandin, let's talk about this? As I type these words I can feel the weight of it on my heart - the feelings are so overwhelming - do I have the courage to face them? If not, I will miss the final piece of healing I have to do from the most violent experience of my life. And, if not, I will still have a brother, but I will lose a friend.