the blues: a memoir.

The summer air hummed heavy with the songs of crickets and cicadas on my last day living in Georgia, when I sat in the back yard with my brother Matt and listened to him play the blues on his guitar.

It’s really difficult to describe the sound of the blues to someone who hasn’t ever heard them as I have, raw and unrestricted and beautiful. I’ve sat back in the warm Southern heat that the music was born in, felt the hard plastic mold of a patio chair burn slow through my t-shirt, and I’ve heard: heard fingerpicking and slide strumming, heard the notes hang sweet in the air, heard the soul that lives in the music.

That day we sat still, but the world kept moving around us. Birds chirped in the trees and squirrels chattered at the feeders Dad had hung in the backyard. Blue- and yellow-tailed skinks rushed up and down the wooden sides of the house, chasing spiders and tiny bugs. The dogs raced around in the overgrown grass, tearing after anything that dared to move, and one of them got a swat on the snout from my overgrown, easily-annoyed cat, Fuzz.

Matt played his guitar and I closed my eyes. I let my head fall back and the sun flared gold against my eyelids. In an hour it would begin to set and I’d have to go inside to finish packing. I had spent the past several days hopping from brother to brother, house to house, trying to visit everyone and put in adequate face-time before tomorrow, The Big Day, when I would board a plane and change all of our lives forever.

While we sat there we didn’t speak. I didn’t exactly know what to say, and Matt probably didn’t, either. The weird thing about our relationship has always been that we don’t really talk very much; we’re just good at being around each other. Even now, four years later, when I visit Matt we don’t bother with small talk, don’t do the whole how’s-school-how’s-work charade. We sit, we eat, we watch T.V., he plays guitar, I pluck at the strings of a ukulele.

One thing I’ve always been insecure about is my own ability to maintain stable relationships with people. Friends, family, significant others—I can screw up pretty much anything. But with my brother Matt, it almost seems like I can’t. I can’t mess up our relationship, our weird little brother-sister bond, because it’s stronger than I am. I guess that’s why Matt means so much to me, why I remember the times I spend with him more than I remember my times with anybody else in my family.

And I guess that’s why he’s the subject of my memoir.