Reasons to Write

On late sleepless nights as a kid, I was on my own, but I wasn’t alone. I shared a bedroom with the body of my older brother. David was born five years earlier, and he slept or snored through every evening. He was always present, like a somnolistic statue, a shadow casting itself in a puddle on the far wall. There was an alley between us, two narrow feet separating two single beds. Now and then he’d speak in his sleep. I kept a journal for a while of everything he said, itemized and dated to tease him with later. If there was ever someone who tried to understand me, it was Dave, coming on with a kindness that couldn’t stand to see someone hurting. There were a lot of late evenings after bedtime, lying and talking about every kind of memory or emotion, drifting in the general direction of sleep.

David was the peacemaker, born five years before me, and two years after our oldest brother James. He’d run interference when I’d stirred the beehive, leaving me just enough lead time to facilitate an escape behind the few locked doors at home. He was the silent sort, strong when what he said was tempered by what he didn’t. I had a juvenile respect for his old-world kind of honour and honesty, like the tales of knights and noblemen. David was nerdy by some standards, big glasses and a follower’s demeanour, content to burn afternoons slamming balls slap-shot into his street hockey net out back. I’d never known anyone with such a push for perfection, a goal for perfect aim.

David spent months into years on a novel-in-progress, pulp fiction in the mold of Hardy Boys. He’d often write outside in a make-shift recliner, made of scavenged lumber nailed to the exposed wood of a spine-shaped tree root. I thought it was a brilliant book he’d created, with all the easily pleasing tropes and clichés of adventure writing, sure to make any child happy. Dave even sent it out for a few form letter rejections, woefully collected at the mailbox and slipped out of sight in a drawer. Aside from a few poems following a breakup years later, he was never a writer again. Most of my reasons to write started with him.

In the early 2000s, David would take me out in his beat-up ’92 Toyota Corolla, and we’d go see what was showing at the local theatres. We went to small screen Zedex in Greenwood, or the sprawling Empire in New Minas, listening to music on the road. It was raging rock and pounding noise of beautiful anger, bands like P.O.D. or Blindside, and it meant so much that he loved the music that moved me. We’d sing along to the same dozen tracks in a thousand revolutions on tape deck, and he’d be thumbing the steering wheel, hand drums by the beat. We didn’t speak of much significance on those drives, just the nerd noise of music and movies, bypassing emotion. His silence was never stony, judging or accusatory, a listener without restraint.

I was sixteen when David moved out in 2003, heading to Bridgewater on the South Shore. It was over an hour from Bridgetown, crossing Nova Scotia from one coast to the other. He’d left for work with the cable company, but it was an incomplete transition, as he’d often return on homesick weekends. Weekdays seemed a strange absence, having slept several feet away all my life. I’d gotten used to his snoring, soft drone of what white noise one makes while sleeping, now and then rising to a roar.

I stayed just once at his new digs, down a tree-lined street where he’d booked room and board advertised for single male tenants. Dave had left our family home, sure enough, but was domestically untrained to cook and clean for himself. His room was a repressed rectangle, blinds closed in reflection to what his life in that place represented. Friendship was not forthcoming in his new hometown, where life was shaped by work, sleep, and the dull passage of entertainment.

While flipping stations, I stumbled over reports of a coming storm, distant worry on a sunny September. But when Hurricane Juan ran aground that late Sunday evening, he crashed through trees in the darkness, raging howl all around us. I’d never heard a storm scream so loudly, wailing voice that beat its chest and broke the backs of branches outside. It was an unrestrained force that shook me to sleep, under creaking walls and rattling windows. Felt like cresting a waterfall in a barrel, twisted and turned for hours. Then I woke from dead rest to a deaf quiet dawn, low calm after chaos. The sky was still and clear, shining sun on wet soil, and a million yellow pine needles coating the asphalt driveway. I took a deep breath at the end of a long exhale.

It was only a few months later when David left that town for Truro, where he fell in love, then got married in 2005 — and I can’t recall ever being happier for another human. Dave still lives there now, and every time we get together is a good one.

May 12, 2026
Debert, Nova Scotia

Year 19, Day 6757 of my daily journal.