Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Maki Kashimada

Author:Maki Kashimada
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

My past is rootless. My impressions change from one to the next. No sooner do they summon joy than they turn to pain. No sooner do they seem comfortably pale than they become blindingly vivid. I don’t know what kind of person my brother was anymore. Mad or sane, kind or cruel, lustful or austere. I don’t know my brother, and I don’t know myself. My brother has always been the person on the other side of the mirror. My perception of myself has always been relative to how I see him. I look at my brother first, and then by comparing myself against him, I know myself. That was how my mother taught me to perceive myself. You’re better at studying than your brother, she used to say to me. You’re better behaved than your brother. When she said that, I thought to myself: I see. I see. I earned more A grades on my report card than he did. My homeroom teacher never called my mother about me breaking the rules at school like he did. That was why I never had any dreams of my own about what I might like to do for a career when I grew up. All that I knew was that I could study a little bit better than he could. I didn’t even know if I was attractive. I was just a student who didn’t break any of the rules.

My mother loved my brother more than she did me. She loved only him. I don’t know why. I understood, at some vague level, that he was attractive. So I gave up. I could never match his charm. I would let him have my mother’s love. I swore to myself that I would love him as much as my mother did. My mother created my brother first. She gave him his existence. A perfect existence. She never doubted how much she needed him. No matter how much he misbehaved, he was her child, her adorable child, and so she kept him by her side. And so thinking, she gave him life. Next, she made me. She made me in the image of my brother, but she didn’t need me with the same compulsive necessity that she had for him. I was an empty likeness of him. My mother assigned something to him and nothing to me. Unconsciously.

When my brother died, the existence in which we had so blindly believed died with him. My brother died and I lived. That was, the true image died, yet the false image remained. I could stand in front of the mirror, but there would be no reflection. My brother was no longer on the other side. All that was left were words. Words describing him, words that remained inscribed in my heart. My brother was real. For my mother, he was real, while I was fake. My brother was the center. The center of the family. My mother and I were cogs gyrating with love around him.

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