I Wanted To Hate You

I wanted to hate you.

I cannot deny it. I wanted to be able to forget you ever affected me, and scorn all of your life choices, and to have laughed at your deathbed.
But it is impossible to hate you, really. I tried to make you jealous, in the hope you would say something that I could use to inspire this needed hate. You never were. I paraded past your workshop more than once with gaggles of young, beautiful women, and if I ever saw your face, it only looked sad. It broke my heart, you know, when you told me no. You were supposed to be special, and different, and you had accepted me in every other way…

It hurt because I felt that I had accepted you. You loved men, and thought people could fly, and I never told you no. I never told you that you couldn’t. You were supposed to do the same for me.

But the girls, they never had your spark. Some of them had a spark of their own, but it wasn’t what I was looking for any longer. I told a group of them once that I believed man would fly. They laughed, like it was another joke I was telling them. Another story.

Every time I started to try to demean you in my head, all I could focus on were the things I loved about you. It made life difficult. The way you always had paint or ink somewhere on your skin, the way kissing your cheek made my lips itch, the fascination you had with the way I could throw myself off of buildings in complete faith I would be fine, because I said once that it felt like flying…

But you had abandoned me, or so it felt. I thought you were going to be the person I could always go back to, and you suddenly weren’t anymore. All I had to lean on was my brother, and you knew how bad a crutch he makes.

And when I came back to see you and you were so old…

It almost felt worse than leaving you when you were young. You looked like a stranger. No, not quite… You looked like your own father. Similar but far, far too old. I missed you during those years, but in hindsight, I think it would have been worse if I had stayed. Watching you slowly find it more difficult to do things, or start to forget things… I wouldn’t have been able to stand it.   
 
I did not open the box you gave me immediately, I will admit it. I still think of it as our box, even now, and you had said it was for when you were gone. So I waited. I had other things to do.

I am still not sorry about your lover. He may have been good for you, and he was not the reason you and I grew apart, but he was someone to pin blame to. My intention was only to scare him, at first, to stop him gambling or spending your money, or to make him give you all of his affection in the twilight years of your life. But he would not let the argument go, like a dog with a bone, and he pushed me.

I was not in the mood to be pushed.

With hindsight I think we were both jealous, though I only knew I was at the time. I was envious of his relationship with you, because it was still happening. He was jealous of me, most likely, because of what we had before he even met you. Because I was still on your mind.
I may be assuming things here, but I was, was I not? You still thought about me. That got me through the years up to your death.

The years after you died? The contents of our box. Half-finished sketches of me, both one I recognised and ones I did not. Some of the letters I sent you, and some you had written but did not ever send back. Your ridiculous hat that you were so attached too and one of those ribbons I used to use to tie my hair out of the way, when it was still the fashion. There were other things, but the thing that made me so happy was the note on the very bottom of the box. I do not remember now if it was something you had written once before, or if you put it in to remind me later, but all it said, in the large, careful handwriting you had when you wrote so I could read it, was I love you.

As time has gone by, I have ended up with a lot of things that have to be stored, in houses or warehouses for the purpose. But the things I do not trust to those places, too worried that they will burn down or be robbed, I keep in that box. I keep with me, at all times.

I know you cannot reply, or even read this, but I wanted to write to you. Isabella- a friend, who I met over a hundred years after you had died, and turned in the end- was reading aloud from the newspaper- another thing to explain, I suppose, but mostly just a herald written down, and daily- and yesterday, for the first time, man flew.

I do not mean glide, though that was a good start. From the ground, they took off, and flew.
It has made me think of you.

There are so many things you would have loved about this world now. The printing press becoming so huge, electricity, light bulbs and telephones…

Words can be stamped in huge quantities with metal blocks and ink, and we can light a room by flicking a switch. You could speak with someone in another city instantly, with no wait. You would love it. Perhaps not as much as the huge industrial surge I remember from a hundred or so years ago, but you would love it all the same.

This is painful. I should not find it difficult to write to you. I have been toying with the idea that not aging means we cannot change either, and even in the year 1902 I still cannot get over you.

The calendar changed too. It is Gregorian now, not Julian. The change is not huge, but it is enough. Instead, I shall say that it had been approximately three hundred and fifty years since your death. That is a long time, even for someone with as much time as I do.

I have no one to send this to. I think I will keep it in our box, however. When another two hundred years have passed and I want to remember.

Still-and in all likelihood forever- yours.