Epiphanies Regarding Elephants

I don't think domino masks make you any more mysterious, but you tried. The former sentence is irrelevant to this poem.

Six years

seems like nothing.

I remember your face

from before, absent of 

the resentment, years of hate
that've scarred you, displaced

from the dreams I know you had,

before you lost hope in yourself,

in my Dad.

It hurts

to think about the time I wasted,

childish, petty, boys being boys,

so typical of me, "genius",

self-proposed hero of the story,

I wrote you off, destroyed every childhood

dream, left only ghosts to tower over me,

agreed with everything spoken 

in hurt behind closed doors

like it was something deserved, 

while you took every hit, brushed them off

acting like they missed, when there was nothing 

you needed more than someone to just shut the f**k up,

it's always been more complicated than it seemed.

Each year worse than the last, resentment stacking

against the man who once made you smile

I defended repeatedly, as if he never did a thing, 

and it took me over 16 years and a year-long coma to see

that you've been hurt for far longer,

far before the pain that made me.

But those years don't seem to matter much

when you call just to talk, keep in touch, 

or tell me how your apartment feels claustrophobic

and your only saviors, small.

No, when I look at us now,

the past doesn't seem to matter at all.