The book your mother always threatens me with says we’re made of dirt. Loosely, that’s about right. We are carbon and nitrogen and oxygen and hydrogen and iron and sodium and potassium and assorted trace minerals, just like the earth.

I tell your youth pastor I don’t think red earth would be very good for making people; there would be too much iron in it and that would lead to iron poisoning. He looks irritated and tells me god works in mysterious ways and I tell him he should think of a better response for when the children get inquisitive and want a little more than something equating to “because he said so.”

You hate going to church anyway, you tell me, so it doesn’t matter that I’m not allowed back there; it just gives you a better excuse not to accompany your mum. I ask you if you’ll miss the chance to confess and you look at me out of the corner of your eye like I’m daft and tell me that I’m thinking of Catholicism. There’s no confession in your church.

Now is not a time for religion and repentance, now is a better time for recollection, for reflection. We look into the mirror in your bathroom and make monster faces and this is exactly what reflection should always mean. Recollection is a natural byproduct.

I remember a long time before when I hadn’t liked you and you hadn’t liked me. Then we were fucking. There was a bit of space in between that, but it doesn’t matter now because there’s no space between us. Just fucking didn’t last because after we got used to each other we couldn’t deal with separation and we couldn’t spend all our time sweating in the back of your half-brother’s beat-ass Camaro with my skinny thighs sticking to the pleather in the half light and the full heat, with your hands learning more about me than I’d ever know.

We like to think we love each other now. Love is a difficult concept for me to wrap my mind around, but maybe that’s something like what we whisper when the dark part of the night slinks in and your windows are letting in a draft because we never closed them after I clambered over the sill and slid in a heap onto the shag carpeting your mother hates.

I sit and think at your window, peering down at the perennials that are the only reminder than your dad once lived here. The sunrise is purple and silver against all possible logic and you nestle your chin onto my shoulder and breathe in my ear. I expect this action should annoy me on some level, but it’s you and that makes is difficult to dislike or even find fault with.

After I tumble softly down the trellis onto your father’s hydrangeas, I take a piece of sidewalk chalk from a forgotten pocket and draw a heart on the patch of sidewalk nearest your window, even though I know the gathering storm will wipe all traces of it away before you even get the chance to see it.

Walking home in the haze of the morning is nice. I have an established pace that leads me back to my sad suburban hunting ground and I try unsuccessfully to lift my feet from the gravel path up to the door.

I hear my da and my brother having an argument before I reach the stoop proper. My brother wants to start a band. He plans to tour Europe as a famous singer. Unfortunately for him, his voice is mediocre at best. My father recognizes this and thinks he’s doing the best for his legacy by teaching him to be realistic and make responsible decisions, but my brother doesn’t want to be realistic and make responsible decisions, he wants to live life to the fullest. I would respect him more for that aspiration if it didn’t cause such a rift in my family.

I climb up to the second window I’ve scaled in the last twelve hours, in an attempt to avoid the sting from words being thrown across the battlefield that is the front hall. My baby sister is sitting on my bed when I drop softly over the sill. Her eyes are dry for now, tears held in by pure force of will, but she chews her lips contemplatively and I fear her metaphoric drought may not hold for long if something doesn’t interrupt the input to her brain of the clash of violent tempers reverberating from the room below. So I pick her up, she’s still small enough to cradle in my arms, though in a few years she won’t be; and I sing to her in my raspy voice.

Before anything else, you and I had one thing in common; we’d both lost a parent. The first time I’d stopped hating you was when I found out your da had died, especially because I’d found out only a few months after my mum had left. Now we both try not to think about it too much, but back then it was the only thing we could bring up that we shared a common rage towards.

But before my mum ran off, she taught me a few songs, old songs she’d learned from dead relatives and in dead languages. I’ve learned that they’re the only things that can calm my baby sister down if she’s in a mood or under duress, so I sing them to her softly, crooning like my mum did back when she still loved da and still cared about the brats she squeezed out.

Ar soudarded a oa gwechall/Dre an Afrik o rodal/A zo breman e-barzh hor bro/'Kraozon ha Landivizio/Hor breudeur a c'hoarzhe dec'h/Zo tec'het kuit gant an nec'h/Zo tec'het hep sonj distro/Klask labour e-maez o bro/Tec'het int holl 'trezek ar Frans/Tec'het an esperans/O c'halono- 'oa c'hwero/P'o deus laret kenavo/Hag en o ziez dilezet/Moc' hoilhed zo digouet/Hag embann breman divezh/Douster ar vuhez war'maez/Me lavar ha lavaro/Se ne bado ket atao/Me lavar ha lavaro/Se ne bado ket atao.

This song is very important. I have no idea what it means, but it requires two people. I have been teaching it to her since she was five. She is seven-and-a-half, as she is quick to remind anyone who asks, and now she knows it. This is a song we can sing together. This is a song mum cannot spoil.

One of these days I’ll teach it to you, just like I always promise. Your voice will do it justice and I’ll be able to enjoy it properly again, just like when I was a child. Or maybe nothing like when I was a child. And maybe it will be a million times better that way.