A violent buzzing pulled me away from some drowsy studying at my desk at 1:40 a.m. I glanced down at my phone to see who was calling and saw my mother’s face.
No call from a mom at that time in the morning is going to be good news.
A million images shot through my mind as I dragged the phone toward my ear. I thought of my little brother speeding across icy roads in his car. I thought of my grandmother in her big house, all alone. I thought of my dad, melting into his reclining chair in front of his television.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” my mom said.
She didn’t sound upset. I took a breath.
“What’s going on?”
It was about my brother. After three years, through high school and beyond, his girlfriend had broken up with him for another guy. One of his friends. A guy that her best friend had a crush on.
My mom wanted me to talk to him.
After he calmed down, I got him to tell me the story. There was a group movie date where the two of them shared some words. Private Facebook messages followed. Then Olive Garden. He found out.
After I heard the whole tale, I tried to disarm the situation the best I could from 1,300 miles away—with humor. Remembering a song from a transcendent boy band from the last decade, 2gether, I told him the hardest part of breaking up is getting back your stuff. My last girlfriend had snagged a beautiful Product Red iPad Nano complete with a Beatles engraving (“Living is easy with eyes closed”) from me when we split up. I wasn’t about to let the same thing happen to him.
I asked him what she had.
Nothing, he said at first. But wait. She had a DVD, “Signs,” with Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. It was mine.
I told him she could keep that damn movie.
Unlike most people, I actually enjoyed that film when it came out. M. Knight Shyamalan was still at the top of his game, and the juxtaposition of aliens and faith was something new. But it was the first movie I saw with my high school sweetheart. I wanted nothing more to do with it.
Like my brother, that relationship spanned through high school and beyond, and like him, it ended badly. I did the breaking up in that situation, but not without much hostility on both sides. Hearing that the DVD had finally left my reach was a reminder of how hard those days were, but how great they are now. We have so little experience at that point in our lives that everything seems like a big deal. But it really does get better.
I just wish I could show that to my brother somehow.
