The messages are there when I get up. It is 9 in the morning but 8 at night back in Canada. They are both random and weird, with very little connecting each message with the other. They are spliced with images and his favourite — links to obscure YouTube clips, which I need to watch two ads to get to. Sometimes I look but most often not but make it seem like I viewed such as ‘interesting’ or ‘oh ok.’
Then the conversation starts usually about something in the news back in Canada. It is always about or against the current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the scam that is COVID-19. I haven’t read about Canadian news or politics in a long time. My brother hates Trudeau, hates the COVIDscam, thinks it is all a hoax. Then come messages about something when we were about 12 or 13, which I barely remember, but for some reason, he does. There is no connection, no logic, but I play around. He is bored, but I know that he is either drunk or high on something, but not sure what. It’s been like this for the past 3 years since he moved back home with my mom and dad. It was before my dad passed. He hasn’t dealt with it and won’t seek help with his death or the trauma in his childhood. It comes out in these streams of consciousness.
In it, there are messages of apologies for what happened in the past. My brother terrorized me as a child. Back then, I didn’t know why and tried to make it better. I couldn’t. We learned later he was abused as a child and that trauma shaped him. It was the reason he hated me because why him and not I. He got into booze when he was in Secondary School and moved on to weed and stronger things. He boasts how he has tried every drug in the book. He is either high, drunk or both when the messages start coming in at around 8 am in the morning Hong Kong time. They last until either I get busy at work or he finds something else to occupy his time.
There are delusions of grandeur — how many tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, and even millions he is making in construction back in Canada. He doesn’t understand why I am not back there — where there is money to be made. The unemployment rate in both Canada and Hong Kong are at their highest. Here in Hong Kong, I make good money and am madly in love with an amazing man. He never asks about my love. He never brings it up and can’t understand why I don’t want to go back there to get drunk with him. I don’t do drugs because of my addiction tendencies and am trying to reduce the amount of booze.
At home, my brother has two friends he’s known since secondary school. He calls them losers, stupid and never measuring up to his standards, but he doesn’t know anyone. He can’t be bothered. He needs a new drinking partner to talk about what happened when we were 12 and 13. Things were better in the ‘good ol’ days,’ but he doesn’t remember how horrible he treated me and how much I used to hate him. It was so bad; my parents sent him to high school out in Saskatchewan — the ultimate middle of nowhere. There we learned he was bullied there, which built his resilience to life but contributed to his addictions.
We have nothing in common. I have lived in Asia for almost 20 years. There are things I have seen and done which he can’t understand. There is a disconnect. It is not just with him but with everything else back ‘home.’ My greatest fear is to go back. It’s something he can’t understand, but he hasn’t lived my life. Also, he has little interest in my life. It is selfish, but that is how it is with addicts, or so I have read.
The messages only lasted for three hours. I have stopped responding or only replying with ‘indeed’ or ‘oh, ok.’ He promises to ‘come and see me.’ It worries me because Hong Kong is so different, but then it doesn’t. He has been promising to come here for the past three years.
