“I was the product of an affair. My father had sex with my mother once, and she hadn’t even told him about the pregnancy. So he never knew I existed. I was an only child. I was desperate to connect with my identity. But I had no way of finding him because my mother remembered his name incorrectly. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I was finally able to track him down. The first time we met, he sat in a chair, pulled out a cigar, and said: ‘I was expecting you to be a boy.’ It turns out that he’d had a son while he was in college, and he’d given that child up for adoption. Somewhere out there, I had a brother. I grabbed a napkin and wrote down all the information my father could remember. But it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t locate my brother. Soon I got busy with my family and my mind moved on to other things. Then two years ago I was on Ancestry.com, and I got a ping. It wasn’t like: ‘Oh, here’s your brother.’ But it was a match of some sort. And I’m really good at investigating that stuff, so I found him on Facebook and sent him a message. After we confirmed things with a DNA test, Eric and I hit the ground running. We call each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister.’ We’ve visited each other’s families. We look alike. We think alike. I’ve shared my poetry with him. He shares his music with me. We’re both divorced, and middle-aged, and experiencing similar things. So there’s so much to talk about. We have these text conversations that last all morning. I’m not that same teenage girl anymore—desperate for connection. I don’t have a void that I’m trying to fill. But he’s just been such a nice addition to my life. I love having a brother.”
#quarantinestories
areudirty
janainaart
prguitarman
snowghoul
titsay
