STORY

It was ridiculous.  That was the only way to think about it.  Or absurd.  It was best to move carefully around it.  The only way we could make sense of that love was to treat it like something very fragile.  We found our home among the most fragile places in the world.  That was where we saw how strong it was, because their fragility would not be anything new.  I already know what that is, we would think.  I already know what that kindheartedness is, we would think when we saw the Vietnamese janitor at my sister's school who liked seeing us whenever I went to walk her home.  "You are a brother and a sister," he would say.  "Yes," we would say.  We already knew because we had seen it in that love.

It was the world catching up. It was always a question of whether the world would catch up. We would always let each other know about the moments when it did. And when we did, we had faith that one day it was going to catch up in a way that was more than moments, that it was going to catch up and stay caught up. We would get impatient with it - after some years it seemed like it had had the example of a brother and a sister for long enough now that we shouldn't be waiting any more. And we wouldn't know if we were supposed to keep being that example or if it was enough to laugh at the world together. Most of the time it was both. We wanted our laughter to be a teaching laughter. Look at us, we'd be saying, we are laughing. Don't you want to be more like that?

Something to laugh about: Well, how about waking up in the morning? I used to love it when my mother would say that she'd slept enough, that I should wake her up.

You should've seen it. You were sleeping.

How did I look?

Funny. Hilarious. I couldn't believe it.

I wish I could've seen it.

Yes. And then you woke up.

Was it funny?

It was too much.

The laughter was there. It was there in the world. Your ability to see it rested on having someone who agreed that it was there in the world. People would tell us we could come along with them when they were going somewhere as long as we didn't laugh about nothing. We laughed when they said it.

I'm sorry, I would think, but I have a sister. I was ready to believe that a man found poetry in the world through his sadness. I was ready to believe that that was what a world was for. And the truth was, it didn't seem so bad. It had clarity to it, and I liked the way it conferred a lot of responsibility on a man. But I have a sister, so I found out that a man could be a genius in his happiness. He could be as creative walking home from school with her as he was walking the same road, meeting the sadness of the world.

Do the poets know about this, I thought. Do they know that everything about the road can change if they walk home along it with their little sister? Am I going to have to be the one to tell them? I looked all through the poetry books for some evidence that they knew, that the burden of telling it wasn't going to all fall on me. It would be all right if it did, but I wouldn't have minded spreading it out a little bit. I didn't find much, which was surprising because it seemed elemental to me. There couldn't have been this many poets who were unfamiliar with having a little sister. I felt bad for those ones though, and I took solace in the fact that at least they didn't know what they were missing.

What I felt bad about though was that everything they received from the world was just half the story. The other half was knowing that you could go home and tell your sister about it. If I thought that a rainstorm was just a rainstorm, then I would probably put the same connotations upon it that the poets placed. But a rainstorm was also coming home and showing your sister how wet you were and laughing, and it began to take those qualities on at the time.

At the time I would look at ugliness or meanness in the world and say, I can't do anything to make you meaningful now, but I have a sister, and when we sit in my room and I tell her about you, you will be the most meaningful you could ever be. You will exist in a different world after that, one where there is something out in the open now to match what you put forth. It was hidden before, and so you thought that it did not exist, but it is out in the open now.

It didn't seem like anything could make it hidden again once it was out in the open. Once it was out, we would see it join the trees and the sky and everything else that was always meant to be out. And then we would know not only that those things were beautiful, but why they were beautiful. They were waiting for us to make something out of human life to join them.

Beauty was extra with a little sister. I could climb a mountain or I could tell her about a molehill I saw. Each would get me to the same place. Each would afford me an expansive view. Here is somebody else. She is a girl, and she seems to be as interested in the world as you. She seems to see the world as just as much hers to discover. It is something to pay attention to.

I paid attention to every part of her discovering the world, looking for clues. How is all of this to a girl's eyes? That was one question. The other was, will there be somebody to see the world as I do? After a while, the first one was enough of an answer to the second one. I didn't have to make the second one into a demand, because I was interested enough in the first one for what it was. The important thing was having questions you didn't know the answer to. That was what made the talking meaningful. Sometimes somebody having the same question was all the answer you needed.

We made our questions into an art form unto themselves. If you didn't know, you would think they were statements to hear us. That was how sure we were that they were the right questions to be asking. There was a certain power to it, and sometimes we would be thinking of that power more than of the asking, but we would see pretty quickly that that power for it's own sake was a dead end. And we would get back to asking with a little more of a sense that our questions should include questioning ourselves.

Sometimes it seemed like we ought to hold back because something might explode. I didn't know what. We were a brother and a sister, Iranian, in America, Pursertown, Washington, to be specific. What could we possibly explode? I didn't know. But there was something, and it wouldn't be a destructive explosion. It would be the explosion everybody was waiting for, of the thing inside them that kept their hearts tight and close to them, instead of coming out. We could explode that thing, but I wasn't so sure that we could handle the consequences. We were only two people, and neither of us knew what our power to explode that thing was. If we exploded it, it seemed like we had some responsibility to give the people what they were to carry around with them next. It was a big responsibility. I just didn't know if we were ready for it. I didn't know what the rest of your life would look like if you had already accomplished that while you were still young.

So we unspokenly decided not to go around exploding things. Not without a plan at least. It seemed pretty clear that we were going to need a plan, otherwise all people were going to notice was that the thing they had was gone, not the chance they had to put something new there. And we knew we would have to go without, but it was a way to go with later. We just had to wait till we caught up to our own love. We could be caught up by ourselves, but out in the world, it could be difficult to do it without excluding, and that was not really what we wanted to do. That was where I learned about silence, because the best silence was around the person with whom you could go around exploding things, but you were waiting. You were waiting till you could get it just right.

It was funny, because we were walking around with a capacity to explode things and a feeling that it was going unheeded. What happened to that capacity when you did that? I wondered. From the outside it looked like resignation. It looked like two people who had the capacity to explode things ought to go around exploding. But whenever we did, we exploded more than we intended. That was the key, I thought: Precision. To be able to explode only that which needed exploding and nothing more. To be able to leave everything else intact. If you could do it with precision, you could leave everything not just intact but stronger.

And I realized that precision was a difficult enough thing to have by yourself. To have it with somebody was what made things ridiculous and absurd. To have the same target as somebody else was wonderful enough. To be able to reach it with them was so magnificent that I thought it must be effortless. This must be what happens when you don't squeeze and strain, I thought. But I had needed somebody whom I didn't need to squeeze and strain around, who looked at me like I had already done enough squeezing and straining to be a part of the world.

I thought every place could be so effortless. And it couldn't, but I could take that effortlessness with me anywhere, and whenever there was a place where there was even the slightest amount of it reflected back, I would think: I know this. I know this from having seen it with my sister. I know how it is when the people don't have to try, they already are. They already are and they have no more need to question themselves than do the trees and the sky or anything else they passed on the way there. The world could be the world, we didn't have to make any lines inside of it to make it smaller or more manageable, because for whatever was big or unmanageable, we had each other. We had each other to know that the other was wondering about it now or would wonder about it one day.

I had no idea if it was the strongest thing in the world or the most fragile. I didn't know then that one thing could be both. I knew I was not afraid of it though. That was about all I knew. There were about a million things I didn't know, but I knew I was not afraid of a brother and a sister. I was not afraid to be them for the world. Whatever stories the world had for a brother and a sister, it was not our job to fit into them. Except for the story that was so big that it was only made of one word, that word being love.

Even around the word though, I still moved carefully. To name it felt like we were putting ourselves above it. It felt arrogant, like it was something we could keep in our pocket and bring out any time we wanted. To me it seemed that love was the product of hard work, the hard work of being alive. I didn't know how to use the word because it seemed like we would be stopping to assess our work, and I didn't know why or how we should assess it. And I thought it might vanish if we did. I loved words, but I wanted to keep one thing unspeakable. Everything else around me that I saw being given a name seemed to be being given borders.

It wasn't until I began to write that I saw that names did not have to be borders. They could contain their own desire for borderlessness inside them. All I had ever wanted to do was to take the world that my sister and I could create around each other and take it past the border of me and her. What had really been fragile all along had been the world outside of us, everything we had not yet come across. It had tried to make up for its fragility by being vast. And that had been why we had been unsure about exploding things - the world we made was so sure that once we exploded something, it might be gone for good.

But once I began to write, I saw that we had been right all along. We had been right to reach for the infinitude of things, to be hesitant about exploding them. I saw that I was only trying to do on paper what she and I did in life. Still it was important to do them on paper because a brother and sister couldn't be art for the world. I knew I had to be very good if I was going to match it. I would be writing in my room back when I still lived in our town and she would come in and I would think, Look, this thing is supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be without squeezing and straining. What do I have to do in order to get there?

What I had to do was leave our house and our town and any chance of my sister coming into my room. I had to go where any chance of this thing being easy had to come from myself. But I felt thankful every night that I sat at my desk that I had had some practice, that I knew where art was supposed to go even if I didn't know how to get there. It was supposed to go to where you felt like it was your world. You might not be sure if it was your town or your country, but you knew it was your world, starting with something like the road you walked home from her school with your little sister, and going from there.