It had been a very late night, the kind where it is almost dawn when you finally get to bed. That is how it tended to turn out when my son had his friends over for dinner, a boisterous group of very interesting guys in their late twenties and early thirties. The dog had gotten me up way too early the next morning, so after she settled back down and I had some toast and lemon tea, I curled up under a big warm blanket and took a luxurious nap. I woke up two hours later, to find the sun walking its light slowly across an embroidery of mine of nine brightly colored exotic butterflies that was hanging on the wall opposite our bed. It was a project that had taken me almost nine months, and I had used 32 colours in the flowers and butterflies that I had hand drawn onto the fabric from a drawing on a neatly folded piece of elegant wrapping paper I had saved because of the beautiful butterflies on it. I was slow to wake up and it was the perfect way to appreciate the sunlight glide across my art piece. It moved me to see how the white stream of light brought out the full brightness of the colours in my needlework. The scene made me think of my delight at having been reunited with a very dear friend of whom I had lost track for 35 years. My reaction at his message a few days back was one of pure, spontaneous joy, with my heart skipping a beat like a surprised child. This friend always felt more than a friend, if that is even possible, because the closeness through a rather controversial set of family circumstances also made him feel like a brother, a brother of the heart. A flood of memories came back, but without hurry, or urgency. The dominating feeling was one of a homecoming, of a welcome back, of the irrelevance of so many years having gone by, of a sense of belonging going back 35 years, that was forged under stressful and probably rather scandalous circumstances, but what they really were was glorious, defiant, a declaration of rebellion and determination on both our parts, considering I was 26 at the time and he was 19. The age difference was utterly irrelevant to us, considering all the other challenges our friendship had to deal with. All these years later, we find ourselves on opposite sides of the planet, each with a family, but the bond of our connection is apparently as vibrant as ever. I imagined my friend visiting me here, and wondering at how I got through all the family tragedies and turmoil, how it felt to be without any of my original blood family in this huge country, marveling at my 27 year old son who towers above me, marveling at the fact that that many years really had gone by, considering I was celebrating 33 years of marriage this summer, wondering about so many things, as I did my own musing as to how my friend ended up in Italy, if his parents were still alive, how his two brothers were doing, how amazed I was how little he had changed in appearance in all these years, as in his photos he looked young, sensual and energetic. I remembered his love of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' book " A Hundred Years of Solitude ", which I read in Flemish first because of him, and later read in Spanish and English in graduate school in Texas. I remember gifting him my only copy of Rabindranath Tagore 's collection of aphorisms " Stray Birds ", and how he told me something I always remembered and often recalled in difficult moments : " Play your role perfectly, but never become your role ", referring to the theatre of life. I remember spending time with him and his friends at the art academy he had attended in Brugge, spending time with him when he was studying art in Gent, and how he and I both struggled with the chaos of our parents' disastrous relationship. We had forged a bond that was very strong, and leaving him and he leaving me in a mutual pact of acceptance and surrender to things way beyond both our understanding and power, did apparently not destroy that connection we feel still as comrades of a war that was ruthless beyond the irrelevance and cruelty of the tangled family circumstances. Neither my mother or father are still alive, both my sisters are dead, my brother lost in the storm of the break up of the family. Like a small but sturdy sailboat appearing on the horizon, there was that message from my brother and friend Filip Porteman, and all I felt was elation, and a sense that I still had a brother after all, no matter that I had lost my blood brother in Texas 21 years ago, my mother had made sure of that. A sense of gratitude filled my heart, a sense of warmth, of deep affection, but the kind of affection that defies definition or claim, that ignores proper versus improper, an affection that pirates on a ship must have had for each other, men and women side by side under the black banner of the skull and crossbones, defying king and country, hypocritical morality and laws, to live by a code that was their own, outside of fear, convention, mediocrity, compliance. " Don't be afraid, just knock on the door ", Filip had shared with me when we reconnected. Electric Light Orchestra's philosophy rings very true. Nothing feels more natural than accepting that open hand invitation coming from an open heart. A brother by any other name is a friend for life.
Trudi Ralston
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