Scout on Siblings/ Mazes in the Chinese Church

The mind chooses the worst times to be vacant. Not a single thought came to my mind on the day I left. I looked, I ate, I walked, but I can hardly remember thinking anything at all. It was never like that before, when my brother and I ran through mazes alone, finding each other and nothing else for years on end. I don’t think I thought anything then either, but I wish I did so that I could remember those times. The places and people that became so far away now engulf my mind. I can still feel those memories in a distant corner of my heart that gets warm when anything vaguely familiar is nearby. Sometimes, in my dreams, I run through the mazes looking for the old him, for the old me, for something that feels right.

Now I feel mature and intelligent, but I felt those things then, too, even if I wasn’t. I feel wrong and right, but I simply want to feel that time. When I lingered at boards with art, writing, festivals, and any semblance of life that I so deeply wanted. Now, I have access to that life, but I’m not sure if I was right to want it. I think of what she would have felt if she had seen my writing on one of those walls or if she had been proud of what I became. If she were proud of what the world had made me become. Had she known the comfort of those endless mazes, she never would have left. Never would she have been found; never would she have found her brother. Whether she won the games or not wouldn’t matter once she lost him, once he grew up and left the mazes on his own.

I wonder if he even remembers those days now. He never mentions it, but neither do I. I don’t want what he thinks of them now to change how we were then. I know he doesn’t respect me the same; my requests are brushed off as needy, and there’s always an excuse to skip any time together. I feel as if I’m still running after him in endless hallways, but this time, he refuses to be found. I pause in a mirror every few sprints, and each time, my reflection is slightly younger. And each time, he gets closer and closer until finally, I reach him. He gets upset and says it’s unfair, but part of him is proud of my improvement. Now the mirrors are gone, and he is, too, but I still have the boards up in my mind. The only way I can play hide-and-seek with him again is by getting on those boards, by proving to him that I am smarter and better than him now, like he was with me before.

He’ll never know the way I look up to him, the way I speak about him as if he created my entire world, my entire maze, and the boards that I so desperately feel the need to be on. So, I shove my achievements in his face and tell him off about his shortcomings, but I still don’t feel any better. If I had only taken note of our surroundings back then, it would be a maze in my head like it is now: easy to solve. But it is only the moments where I can reach true silence, when I come face to face with familiar beige walls and crowded corkboards, that I can feel how I did in those days. It didn’t matter that they were preceded by impossibly difficult math classes and succeeded by lectures from our mother because we had that time together in between. Those times are gone now, and I’m left to run in mazes on my own, without mirrors or boards, and I am alone like all those times we weren’t looking for each other.