It came upon me overnight–this vast aching void that seemed to stretch between my rib cage to my toes and back up again. I thought I needed to burp.

Instead I noticed tears falling. Which felt as relieving as a burp. The tears were for never having brother. My life has been filled with cousins, sisters, nephews,aunts and uncles.

But not brothers. I noticed one appear in my dream, perhaps a miscarriage being from my mother’s previous attempts a pregnancy. He appeared older than me, taller, wiser, with gray around the temples. He told me, while standing in the backyard of my childhood home, between clotheslines flailing with bed sheets, that I needed be so backward looking. “Do not miss me,” he told me a deep voice that seemed at once to lay down the law while lilting toward comfort. “I am here.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Here,” he repeated among the bed sheets.

And as I woke up from my dreams I knew he meant that he was here in my dream.

But I wanted to be in his.