Hiding From The Family
“I saw your brother yesterday.”
“Where?”
“Grocery store car park.”
“No. It must be a look-alike. He can’t return and not call me.”
“He was pushing a cart piled up with food.”
“He lives in Toronto, remember?
“I saw him in these United States of America, this city, Philly.”
You go home and think about it. Is it possible that Seizure (fictitious) is back? You can’t call him because he changed his cell number and is not on Instagram, Face, Tik Tok and other social media playgrounds. He never provided a physical Toronto address. Family is everything right? Maybe in highly religious societies and old money families where the family name and business must be protected at all costs.
But we fight with family because we are adults now and no longer have that strong bond, that made older brother defend younger brother in the schoolyard. Meals are part of growing up. They are also the initiation school for what is right or wrong and what ought to be. It is no longer gospel because kids grew up and have their own views now. It’s more water tight in religion, not in fluid in countries where the individual is paramount.
Seizure, the long lost fictitious brother returned from Toronto, has no intention of contacting family members. Selfishness tears families apart. Maybe he has painful memories like being evicted twice because family members caused chaos where he was renting. Maybe his accounts are in the red because he loaned them money but never repaid. Maybe he got tired of being accused of ‘you think you’re better than all of us.’ Maybe he finally realized that his family didn’t love him.
We hear snippets of this at work, or when we meet people for the first time. We always talk about some family member, who is not with the family for this or that reason. What we don’t tell strangers is that he/she is actually hiding from us, like Seizure, the Canadian returnee.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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