by Jacob Park for the Spring 2026 issue
I first met your brother in the cool, air-conditioned gym down in the basement of our building one sweltering summer. I was a junior in high school and he was a bit older, maybe early twenties, visiting from out of town and staying in the building, it turned out, with you. He gave me a few pointers and warned me against pushing my limits on the free weights without a spot, which he was kind enough to provide, and probably saved my life with that bit of offhanded advice. Then one day, you were there, too. Though I can no longer conjure what he looked like, I distinctly remember thinking that the two of you bore zero family resemblance aside from both presenting as Mexican. You were like Arnold and he was like Danny from that movie Twins, which I’m starting to think maybe we watched together one night with your friend who had long, frizzy hair. If your family owned a tan leather sofa, then the likelihood that this memory is real shoots up to let’s say 85%.
By the end of that summer, the three of us had become regular gym rats and were sometimes joined by my mom, who’d just been diagnosed with cancer and mostly stuck to the treadmills. I never saw or heard about your brother after that summer. In fact, I’d completely forgotten you even had one until I started thinking about how to begin this literary portrait in a collection tentatively titled Missing Persons Reports: Literary Portraits of People I Once Thought I Knew. Anyway, you can see why it’s still tentative.
It turned out that you lived in the exact same unit as ours only three floors up. In those days, I’d blow off steam by cranking up the stereo and “singing” along. One day you asked if I heard the wannabe rock star who just moved into the building, and I quickly confessed before you could utter the complaint I could feel already forming on your lips.
Oh, you exclaimed, as if relieved to have said no more. Singing never came up again, and I was more careful to linger in the lower registers, always double checking that the windows were closed.
…
I’m not sure if you noticed, but I’d been pretty blocked at the time, emotionally speaking, which I very much doubt I’d even taken notice of myself as it wasn’t until fairly recently that I arrived at a perhaps more proper way to think about feelings as things that are meant to flow. I don’t imagine I talked about my dad dying from leukemia two summers prior or watching my mom succumbing to what I’d later recognize as alcoholism, then stomach cancer, then an early grave. But by then, you were already off to college, and I don’t think I ever did thank you for helping me through that rather difficult time.
I was about a week into my eighteenth year when she left her life behind, already technically an adult, so I’d never thought of myself as an orphan, besides which I’d had two brothers (seven and nine years older) looking out for me the best they could, though they were just starting out themselves at the time.
My oldest brother had gotten married and moved into our old building. They took the master bedroom, my mom took the windowless bedroom I’d grown up sharing with my grandma, and my middle brother and I shared the large bedroom facing Bergen Avenue. It was a temporary situation. My nephew was born the week before she passed. At least she’d held on long enough to hold her grandson, people had said.
You weren’t around to attend the funeral. I’m pretty sure I must have mentioned it in one of my letters, but then again, maybe not. I practiced a strategy of compartmentalization back then though I’ve managed to connect the different parts of me up over the years to resemble the coherent character people across the table from me might confront nowadays.
My mom’s nephew invited me to stay with his family in a suburb of Tokyo that summer before I went off to college. I’m not sure what you were up to that summer, but we did manage to reconnect somehow. I remember getting a ride with someone who’d later become a very close friend (though we haven’t spoken in decades) to visit you.
It was probably right before Thanksgiving. We reached New Haven late in the evening. It was a miracle I found you considering we didn’t have GPS or cell phones back then. A party was already in progress in your common room. People came and went as the party contracted to six, expanded to a cramped dozen, tapered off to three. I probably had a lot to tell you, nothing super important, just day-to-day stuff, but your time was monopolized by someone you seemed into, and so I ended up mostly talking to your new friends.
At some point, someone handed me a substance which I promptly ingested, no questions asked except to you about who I owed money to. The music was loud and the dark room somehow made it even harder to hear, and I’d thought you said you already paid her, but when I asked to confirm I’d heard correctly, you responded with some annoyance that you two were friends and that you could pay her later. It was a confusing response, but I later figured you thought I was asking you to cover costs for my portion of the aforementioned substances, which I must’ve felt offended because I didn’t try too hard to get in touch during the winter break, and anyways mine was short because we had something called winter study between semesters and I had to get back to campus right after new year’s.
And then life must’ve happened to both of us. My brothers had moved out of Jersey City, I graduated and moved to Brooklyn and worked as an editorial assistant to an independent book publisher, a rather well-known figure in the industry, then moved to Seoul where I lived on and off for the next five years before getting married and eventually landing right back here in Jersey City. We reconnected on social media. I saw your kids grow up in pictures, learned arbitrary details through random posts about Halloween costumes, new pets, the first days of kindergarten, et cetera. We ran into each other one day near Hamilton Park. You were having brunch with your husband. We must’ve exchanged pleasantries. I believe we also exchanged numbers, though neither of us ever made use of them. You may have been visiting your parents who were still living in that same apartment. Your number had a D.C. area code. Then we ran into each other again, years later, again near Hamilton Park—you jogging, me getting ice cream from a truck with my daughter who must’ve been three or four at the time. Another few years later, you sent a random text message out of the blue asking if I kept a journal, whether it was handwritten or on computer. I responded that I hadn’t journaled since high school, but it was handwritten back then.
That was over a decade ago.
…
I was unsurprised to learn that you ended up a lawyer slash yoga instructor. I never asked what kind of lawyer, but I imagined you fighting the good fight as people in the previous generation used to say. I don’t imagine there’s as much variety when it comes to yoga instruction, but I’ve been accused of lacking imagination before.
Your biological dad was some kind of biker, I don’t mean professionally, just based on the one picture you showed me of the two of you sitting on his motorcycle, flipping off the camera. You couldn’t have been more than six in the picture. I remembered sporting the same bowl cut at that age.
That’s when I learned that M wasn’t your biological dad, though you never said so directly. I’ll always remember him as a kind, vibrant man with an easy, infectious laugh. He took me on as a kind of intern, paying me cash under the table out of his own pocket, cataloging financial records in his office in one of the WTC towers before they fell. It only occurs to me now how hard he worked, most weekends and even shelled out cash for someone else to handle his grunt work so he could work more efficiently at a higher level. Whenever things must’ve gotten to be too much, and he thought he deserved to give himself a break, he’d invite me along on your trips to the Jersey Shore. He never let me pay for anything—my beach bracelet, lunch, gas (though in hindsight, it was naive to have expected a friend’s father to expect his high school intern (i.e. me) to chip in for gas).
…
I was very sorry to learn through social media that he passed recently and have been meaning to reach out long before that anyway. You helped open me back up after my dad passed and for that I’ll be forever grateful.
…
I remember a warm evening when both our windows were open and I saw the light turn on to illuminate the ceiling of your room. I’d been sitting there smoking and idly listened to your half of a phone call until it began sounding like a break-up in progress and I flicked the cigarette butt out the window and shut it soundlessly. I’d always thought that boyfriend sounded like a jerk, but kept my opinions to myself. And anyway, I’ve never met him, just seen him in photos and mostly heard about him from you. I’ve been wary of handsome blond boys ever since.
I remember your best friend had wild, frizzy hair. We hung out in your apartment when your parents weren’t around or the diner across the street when they were. Your dad drove the three of us to Point Pleasant on several different occasions.
I remember your mom, who didn’t care for the beach, was always super nice to me. Maybe she had some idea of the difficulties I’d been going through?
One night when your parents were out, you turned on the stereo and the three of us started dancing and grinding, but you declared that it wasn’t working, and turned off the stereo before the song finished.
You had an older cousin in New Mexico on your biological father’s side of the family. He rode a motorcycle and died young.
You introduce me to bands like The Smiths, Jane’s Addiction, and The Black Crowes. I found my daughter listening to The Cure and thought of you. I’d never played them for her.
I’m listening to The Black Crowes’ Tiny Desk Concert right now. I’ve never once heard you sing.
Once while folding laundry together in the windowless basement room, I was impressed by the sheer number of jeans you owned. I owned exactly two pairs for most of my life: one black, one classic blue, so I always had something to wear when the other pair was in the wash.
An air of rock and roll wisdom clung to you like softened denim, and you had the brightest black eyes I’ve ever seen.
Once you asked why I hadn’t applied to your university, which had the leading English department at the time and maybe still. I just shrugged dumbly—it had never occurred to me to actually research programs before applying. I’d applied to four schools: three reach, one safety. These days, the averages have climbed much higher. My daughter intends to apply to twenty-one schools, which, call me old-fashioned, feels excessive.
I suppose there’s no avoiding a physical description, which we’ll keep politely above the shoulders. Let’s see…. Straight black hair which must’ve been brushed for hours every week to get as silky as it looks in faded memories. You had freckles that flexed like fireworks every time you used that clarion, clear voice of yours. They spoke of strange worlds like constellations over the deserts of New Mexico. I believe the copy of Carlos Casteneda that landed in my library was/is still yours. You had practical matters more figured out than I did; the idea that I was going to make my living as a poet would persist for at least another decade or so. I look back fondly over how naive I’d been, though my wife might imply that I’ve employed the wrong verb tense in this sentence. She inspired my last collection of poems (which I found cleaning out our storage unit this past summer), modeled after Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, but I knew right away she was too good to marry a poet, so I simply stopped wanting to be one.
Now I don’t know if life has made you mistrustful of strangers, which we’ve certainly allowed ourselves to drift towards over the past three decades. Whether you’ve experienced one too many disappointments and grown bitter and resentful at heart while maintaining a sunny disposition with nothing propping it up except sheer will power. I certainly hope that none of that is true, but until we meet again, it both is and isn’t, like that famous cat eternally suspended in a hermetically sealed black box between life and de-animation. 🏁
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