You're almost two-hundred and thirty now, aren't you?
It's strange, I walk down this paved road alone in the sweltering heat and recall what it once was; a hunting trail, patted down over years of use but still natural and blending, in sync with the world around it. There weren't cars, there weren't any enormous houses with satellite dishes or air conditioners, none of this modern madness was even a fleeting thought in anyone's mind, not even my own.
You were there. Tiny, soft, you seemed to vulnerable in your little dressing gown. I held you the first time and I never wanted to put you down again. I wanted time to stop, to sit on the prairie with you and just embrace you, hold you close to me. You were so warm and you smelled sweet, like wildflowers. Those were dark years at home, and you became a solitary light in what had become a nocturnal existence.
My precious little baby brother is what you were, I remember. I'll always remember that little boy called Alfred, running barefoot and wild in the grassland.
I always get sentimental around this time of year, and you don't see me. You're surrounded by others that love and support you; you depend on them now, don't you? You're so strong, yet you feed off the admiration and care of the others around.
I remember when you fed off of my love.
That's the kind of person you've always been, dependant on expectance and love; it's not to be blamed or pitied. I fed off of it just as much as you did, the way you clung to my body and hung on my every word. I was your world throughout those years, wasn't I? I was the whole universe, and anything I said was holy testament.
Francis ruined it. Francis and Matthew, and then Antonio and those children in the South…they came into our happy picture and burned it, tore it to shreds and opened your eyes. I still haven't forgiven a single one of them.
From then on, you weren't mine anymore. You began calling yourself independent, you made a flag of your own, you rebelled against everything I tried to do for you. You forgot the life we'd had and raged like a wildfire, far away from me and into a new world. You were the new world, plunging into a new world. How ironic.
That irony left me standing all alone on a battlefield. Where had my little brother gone? That sweet little child I'd found in the grass had grown into someone strange, foreign and strange. He was insolent, how dare he stand in your place and call himself Alfred? How dare he…I nearly shot him, but then your eyes were in his head, and then you were there again, tall and lanky, you were yourself and at the same time someone else. You were so bewilderingly new, I collapsed. You'd won.
You're two-hundred and thirty now, Alfred. Your world is the world.
But my world is you.