A Beautiful Grey World

The baggage claim area in our local airport was buzzing with activity that day. There were people grabbing their bags from the revolving ribbon that transported the checked bags from the truck that unloaded them to the waiting passengers. Other were meeting up with people for business, they were easily spotted since they held signs of one sort or another with a name on them until someone, usually in a suit, met up with them, then they gathered luggage and left. Then there were those who were meeting loved ones with lots of hugs and a few tears they stood waiting on bags and sharing the latest news, not concerned with the time. In the midst of the confusion of all of this I saw you standing there with your bag in hand looking like you had been transported in time to a place you were unfamiliar with although you had been here before.

Of course since the fight several years ago that had divided our family, you had not been home. You had been the one who escaped. All of us had been damaged in one way or another by that fight, and no one wanted to even think about it let alone talk, yet here you were standing there looking around, like some lost pup that had been left out in the cold. How would you know that in the time you had been gone a lot of things had changed, no one knew where you had gone. Our parents had both passed on, the fight never really allowing them to parent effectively and no way were either of them going to back down an inch, not to the very end, each felt justified in their anger and couldn’t see the world in terms other than black and white. You see, in their small world every thing was either black or white, there was no room for grey. No small patch of hallowed ground that either of them could have used to agree to disagree, no their hate was complete and cemented in the years that led up to their demise.

I almost left, and left you standing as I knew I was aligned with our mother and you with him. I can’t even standing here, even knowing what the hate had done, and even call him father. I had stopped thinking of him in that term many ages before it seemed. Yet with trepidation and a deep breath I called to you. “Angela” I said, trying to be calm, yet feeling the tide of emotion just under the surface. “over here”. I tried to smile as you turned my way and I watched as you struggled to maintain yours. Two strangers you and I. I was the older sibling, the one who was supposed to be the role model for those younger, yet I felt no more than a babe most of the time, yet I would never have admitted that. Always expected to be more, do more and act better than I felt capable of doing, yet at the same time so afraid of our fathers judgment, I did little more than what was expected and tried to stay out of the way.

When you finally reached me across the crowded room, my mind went blank. I had practiced for days before your arrival, and I had the perfect speech all ready for you. Yet now that you were here, flesh and blood before me, I had no words, even the few that darted through my overwhelmed brain refused to come out of my mouth. “Justin” you said, with a trembling voice, “its good to see you again”.  We stood there like that for a few seconds and then finally I was able to break the spell. “Angela” I began, not knowing what I was going to say, yet just letting my emotions guide the conversation, “it has been a long, long time” I watched as you set your bags down and I forced the tears that threatened to make an appearance back down and grabbed you in a hug that was years in the making. I felt your arms slide around me and return the hug in a fierce almost hungry way and I knew then that somehow we would survive the next few weeks as you visited and we caught up on all that had transpired.

As it turned out, the news of our parents death was a release for us all. Now, without them to order us to choose a side we all seemed to find each other and learn to love again. Never, we cried would anyone or anything separate us again. Never, we agreed would any of us become familiar strangers again. We spent the days and nights we had together talking, sometimes all of us at once. A stranger would have thought us all crazy I suppose, yet we all understood each other and our need to cleanse.  And we discovered that even though we had all been through the hell of our parents living nightmare of abuse and neglect we had all become solid adult human beings with love and compassion to spare. Each of us had moved on, some of us needing more than a talk with a friend to heal, yet all of us had. It was an amazing time for us to realize that we were ok, we were together and we would survive in our world where grey was a beautiful color.