#BUT YEAHHH hey kara how you doing girl!!!!

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

WHO UP AND READY TO CRY:

Kara doesn’t say anything even though she should—for a moment, she seems frozen as if in shock, not even her hair braying in the breeze of Jeremiah’s standing fan. As he looks at his sister, her curly brown hair that’s grown far past her shoulder blades, her eyes that are now fitted with contacts instead of boxy glasses, her nose that’s now pricked on the right by a cubic zirconia, he realizes he wasn’t just vague about his reasons for returning home, but cruel. What kind of brother calls his sister on a Sunday morning and explains his abrupt return is nothing to worry about, that all he needs is time, that in a week he’ll be better, clearer? What kind of brother says that if a week isn’t enough, then two certainly will be because he’ll quickly learn how to love the scent of coffee again and how to ask for a table for one and how to dance on his own and how to think fondly of a sunset and how to pray without feeling wrong and how to sleep alone? What kind of brother says that in any regard Madonna’s releasing Confessions on a Dance Floor in less than a month so he expects he’ll change by then and if that doesn’t fix him he’ll figure it out anyway? And what kind of brother looks at his sister now and thinks that in all this time he’s relieved she was never there to see him get into a bar for the first time, see him find himself in his houseplants and in Biyu’s laugh, see him fall in love with the wrong man? When Jeremiah was ten and his sister was sixteen, they’d promised each other they’d stay close, and maybe at that age, he didn’t know what that meant, to remain intwined in someone’s life till you were an intrinsic part of them—a lung and a breath, dog and a bone, a god and the son he creates. But here they are, so close, so far apart, Jeremiah’s mouth formed around a question he can’t bring himself to say out loud. What kind of brother leaves?