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I sleep at my brother’s four times a year, now, and he gets on me for eating take-out on top of the guest bedroom comforter (“Who the fuck eats chocolate mousse cheesecake alone at two in the morning?“) and struggling with the lock in the middle of the night and not knowing how to work the coffee machine-it’s $300. I dent his truck backing out of the driveway and scrub my plate with the wrong kind of expensive soap and the way that I open the blinds in the morning scares the dog, Kip has a sensitive stomach and you overstimulate him, he shakes.

I wear one of his t-shirts doing laundry and he calls me a stalker. My sister-in-law orders pizza for dinner and I pick out the hard boiled eggs in the salad she made. One slice falls to the floor. He sighs as he picks it up, and we’ll never walk into the house that we grew up in again.

I wake up early one morning, too early, the Winter sky whispers for dawn but it’s an hour away, at least, handfuls of fragmented, easy dreams are still promised to me, but I reject them because I woke up in my hometown this morning, and I haven’t heard my brother getting ready for work downstairs in eight years.

His tread is heavy, he slams cabinets he could offer consideration. He is only gentle to-briefly-address the dog, even the way that he turns the water from the kitchen sink on, rips the fridge door open, complains of the absence of softness. He is nearly a decade older than me, these sounds are the preface to hundreds of twilights-middle school and high school, my first year of college. He slams the front door on the way out, slams his car door after getting into it. What an odd thing to miss, I think, but I do.

I spend Sunday getting too-drunk with the girl who was my best friend in the third and fourth and fifth grade, we used to fall asleep talking on the phone on school nights and sleep at the other’s house five times a week in the summer but I haven’t seen her in seven months and we have other friends, now. Closer friends.

We spent every afternoon of junior high together dreaming on her trampoline and used to promise ourselves we’d be singer-actresses but now we press credit cards into tiny clipboards at brunch and talk about master’s programs.

She lives with her boyfriend. We make polite conversation in their kitchen: Yes, Florida’s beautiful this time of year, yes, it’s such a shame gas prices are getting so out of hand. Yes, probably, Maddi and I maybe could have done without a bottle of wine each and two bottles of champagne with our breakfast.

He says the three syllables of her full name with affection poorly masked as annoyance. They set down plates and salad bowls and silverware that all match. “Fuck them all, I’ll tell ya,” She is talking about the nuns who made us cry twice a week in Religious Education, first grade to eighth. We laugh into our cloth (cloth!) napkins.

She is in the kind of love we dreamed about as girls. We are sitting at the dining room table of our eight-year-old fantasies. This love, this house, the laughter. And the moment is perfect and dream-like, and I think, bitterly, and not, that he knows her soft, but I knew her wild. He’s her plus-one to our high school friends’ weddings and who she brings to Thanksgiving but I knew the names of all her stuffed animals. I ripped out magazine pages to collage her bedroom walls.

And boldly I think to myself, I wonder who knows her more, truly knows her more. And even now I’ll tell you it’s me. We don’t talk for months, sometimes. I only see her every-other time I’m in town. Me.

I fly home tomorrow and it all bleeds together-when I stopped calling Gloucester “home,” when it started having to share that title like I have to share my brother with his new family and Maddi with the the friends better suited to her and the boyfriend she’ll probably marry. I won’t be in the wedding, but I’ll be there. And I wish it wasn’t like this, alone at night, a knife.

I keep the guest bedroom door unlocked and marvel at the last time that I felt safe enough to do that. A few months back, the calendar in my cousin’s kitchen had my birthday circled, my name and “25th” scribbled down, and I think of how many homes in this world, how many street addresses filled with plants and pictures and neurotic dogs have my birthday written down.

And how many ill-paved driveways with sea-glass colored grass used to have it, but don’t anymore. How my Aunt used to be my lunch date every Wednesday, religiously, but is three letters stamped on my forearm now, the second one’s a little blurry, the tattoo artist held me when I cried.

How I wince at the mention of Christmas and all the Christmases ahead of me that she’ll never have, but I’ll be sworn to. How my oldest little cousin is past running to greet me now, but still rises quickly, a little, you’d miss it if you weren’t looking, the excitement, muted and pale. But it’s there.

How all of the softball practices and afternoons sun-drenched in boredom and banana chocolate gelati’s of her youth are flickering, spinning, pushing, away from her, same as they were torn from me, achingly beautiful but never loyal, never ours to keep.

And how could I leave here, how could I stay?

Maybe it’s just like this, past a certain age. When you’re old enough to sit in a bar, then add a few years. When you realize you’ll never be twelve again.