Tribesman

Tribesman

By E.P. La Brecque

When you were born, I joined my mother to cross the street and have a look at you. Seven years separated us—you, the son of a developer and a woman from a Chicago family of note, the three of you comfortably ensconced in the neighborhood whose houses your father had built, all except the one you yourselves lived in, with its mahogany paneling and split-level elegance; and me, the son of a city clerk and a woman who had taken vows but fallen ill, dropping out of the novitiate. We lived in the smallest of the four models your father offered, and even then only because my grandmother, married in her late fifties for the fifth and final time, at last into wealth, underwrote us. Looking down at you, I had no inkling we would grow up to become such close friends. She looks just like you, my mother said to your mother. Which is, of course, the polite thing to say. She looks just like you, too! my mother softly exclaimed to your father when he stepped into your olive green-shaded nursery a few moments later. My mother, ever the pleaser. But she wasn’t wrong: As my scrutiny shifted between you and your parents, I understood how malleable a resemblance can be. I also intuited that, before long, your features would settle somewhere along the continuum between your parents’, and you would resemble only yourself. I think back on this now because of the selfie you sent, of you and your girlfriend somewhere in Thailand. It’s the first time I’ve considered your face in years. My, how you’ve aged, I can’t help but think. Not that your features have fallen. Reassuringly, they haven’t. No, not aged in that sense. You have simply become someone else, no longer an individual but an archetype, the member of a tribe, a tribe whose name is now lost to memory but whose indomitable look has finally resurfaced to claim your features. Standing before the bathroom mirror, I try to discern whether my tribe, too, has come for me.