A bit of an oldie that I started back in August but finally wrapped up.

I spent last weekend at the lake, as I’ve done many weekends this summer.

This weekend, however, was the first time all season that my dad, brother, and I found ourselves there at the same time.

Sometimes, when we sit down for dinner, it feels as though we are cosplaying as a family. Actors who return to their separate lives and journeys at the end of the day. It feels foreign, almost unfathomable, to think there was a time we all inhabited the same tiny apartment for over a decade.

When I left the city at thirteen for what would be the rest of my adolescence, my brother was sixteen—still a shy, scrawny high school kid. Neither of us knew it would be the last time we’d live together.

Now, if you had told us that, neither of us would’ve been particularly upset. Our fights were so tumultuous that the custody agreement had to be adjusted; instead of me and my brother trekking between apartments together, we would each spend the weekdays at separate apartments, only coming together for two (unbearably long) days at the same parent’s house every weekend.

Since moving back to the city, I’ve been afflicted with a persistent case of imposter syndrome.

Obviously, change is inevitable. I’ve sat in enough therapists’ offices to know that. “Change is the only constant”— thanks, PJ.  But that doesn’t make adjusting to it any easier.

Oftentimes, I am simply going through the motions, as if I must prove, whether to myself, some omnipresent therapeutic presence peering over my shoulder, or those around me, that my family is normal (whose family is really normal, though, but that’s a whole other can of worms). That the years I spent away didn’t leave a glaring, gaping hole behind. We’ll go out to dinner, see each other for birthdays, and drive to the grandparents to sit for brunch, all while feigning oblivion to the underlying air of contempt between certain relatives. 

None of it ever felt real, though.

My family has always been complicated, as I’m sure you can glean from the snippet of my sibling dynamic and the sheer fact that my parents shipped me off to years of therapeutic intervention. Home life was not smooth sailing.

Yet I’ve found myself wishing at times to return to that apartment, despite all the tantrums, arguing, and tears.

I used to think it was a classic case of nostalgia, looking at my childhood through a shiny pair of rose-colored glasses. It’s easy to romanticize a time with so few cares and worries.

I no longer think that.

I’m in mourning.

In all the time I spent grieving the parties I never got to go to, proms and homecomings I was absent for, the first kiss/boyfriend I didn’t have, I forgot to grieve having my parents with me for those years of my life.

Growing, becoming myself, alongside them.

I never got to curl up in my mom’s arms, crying over a boy as she told me about her first heartbreak. Never got to help my brother move into his college dorm. Wasn’t even around when my dad decided to buy the very house I’m having these epiphanies in.

So no wonder I feel a distance from my family. There is a distance. 

I’m not saying things would have gone perfectly, or even well, if I had been at home all that time. In fact, there probably would have been a shitload of turmoil.

A kind of peace settles over me with this realization. The whole time I’d been so focused on what I’d lost that my family couldn’t give back to me. I missed the fact that I’d lost my family, too. Failing to understand the depth of my loss had been holding me back without me even knowing it.

Peace, because while there is an undeniable permanence to the loss I feel over my adolescence, my parents are still here, a train ride away. 

I was just thirteen years old when I left home for the first time. When you’re that young, most children don’t have a complete, nuanced understanding of their parents as people, too. People who had lives before you were even conceptualized. They’re just mom and dad. And you can bet I didn’t spend my fifteen-minute weekly calls in treatment interrogating my parents about the clubs they were members of in high school, or what their friends were like.

I ask more questions these days. Trivial things. So many things I do not know, things that may have come up in conversation as I was entering new stages of teenage life.

I never thought I’d utter these words, but my brother and I are actually becoming friends.

It dawned on me at the Renaissance Faire, of all places, as I snapped hundreds of photos of him in hopes of helping to curate the perfect Instagram dump for his feed.

How did we get here?

Laughing at the annoying girl in the audience at the glassblowing demonstration who couldn’t seem to keep her thoughts to herself.

Getting psychic readings and reflecting on which parts rang true.

Halting all plans to watch cats and rats do tricks on a stage.

For the first time in years, I wasn’t an outside observer of my family, wondering what our dynamic might say about us. I was just living it.

I don’t know what changed. We are still the same family we’ve always been. The same baggage, same history. But I guess for a moment, I allowed myself to be in the present instead of being so consumed by our past.

I will never get the past back. 

180 West End Avenue will never be our home again.

It’s likely none of us will live together again.

But we do all live in the same city.

I still have the future.