Different Versions of the Same Life (On Cousins)

There are people through whom we get to see different versions of our own life. One little step this way or that and we could very well be living their life, or them, ours.

These people are our cousins.

My very first memory is with my cousin Kyle, at a family vacation in the North Carolina mountains. The memory picks up in the middle of the action: rolling down a large hill in the backyard, chasing after a big red ball together.

Then, like often happens in a dream, the memory cuts to a second location. We’re inside, but not the main house; it’s a small, cottage-like building. And now everyone is there—my parents, aunts, uncles, my grandmother—hurried in by a summer thunderstorm that has erupted from the ether, taking us all by surprise. Hanging above, on wooden racks from the ceiling, is decadent glass dinnerware: plates and wine glasses. Shaking, shaking, shaking.

There’s the joy of chasing after the ball, and then the nervous feeling of being surrounded by the shaking glass. I remember thinking fragile. These things are fragile.

Kyle and I’s mothers had both married Gardner boys, hardworking and optimistic Eastern North Carolinians who earned their back-to-school clothes by packing tobacco barns in the summer. His had married the oldest, a firm handshake with a dirty joke, and mine the one who loved Robert Frost and “Penny Lane” by The Beatles, the peacekeeping middle child.

Our mothers got pregnant three months apart, their bellies becoming hills chasing after one another. Kyle beat me to the ball, but I rolled in to meet him at the bottom.

Both marriages would end a few years later, Kyle and I both too young to understand the weight of divorce. Though we would both go on to feel that weight for years to come, there were small but significant differences.

These differences are called circumstances.

I lived with my mom, a generous aunt, and my high-achieving older sister as a role model, Kyle and his mom were on their own. While I learned about “God and Country” as a Boy Scout — however laden with American Exceptionalism — my mischief consisted of stealing my mother’s red nail polish to wound my plastic Army men. Meanwhile, Kyle was roughhousing on the playground, spilling over into whatever the other latchkey kids deemed the after school special. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I attended good public schools and was surrounded by white wine suburbanites. Kyle came of age in Fayetteville, a military town lined with decaying shopping centers and strip clubs. Both towns were fantastic places to get into trouble, mine because it always seemed to come out clean on the other side, his because of pure opportunity.

But even into our semi-delinquent teenage years our better qualities seemed to prevail thanks to a resilient attitude of hard work and optimism; after all, we were Gardner boys.

When I saw Kyle, the nuances of our lives and how it changed them were clear. But greater than those differences was something pure between us that would light up when we were together, that we could recognize—him in me and me in him.

Life would only continue to get more difficult for Kyle, but even when his back was against the wall he always believed in himself and that his circumstances could change. With the right choices, he could create his own fate.

Which made him a perfect candidate for the military: role models, organization from chaos, and a system that rewarded hard work and optimism.

While I signed the dotted line to attend college in the fall, Kyle signed one to join the U.S. Army: a moment that was similar but significantly different. A different version of the same life. And there’s the moments that play out.

My parents, though divorced, are both there to move me into my freshman dorm room. Kyle reports for duty. As I struggle to come to terms that I’m at a college I don’t like, Kyle flourishes at basic training. He writes me an enthusiastic letter saying that his drill sergeant has nicknamed an exercise “Gardners” because he’s so good at them. I decide that life’s too short to be unhappy, so I file transfer papers and am on my way to a new, wonderful college experience.

That summer I get a job as a camp counselor. Kyle marries his girlfriend and deploys to Iraq.

I go to fraternity parties and cram for my econ exams. Kyle maneuvers past IUDs as one of the first to stake out high priority areas. I get a drinking ticket and have to get a lawyer. Kyle’s armored vehicle hits an IUD. Everyone survives, but he now has micro-shatters in his leg bones, shrapnel in his arm.

In 2010, I graduate in the burnout of the Housing Crisis. Kyle returns home and starts managing a car detail shop specializing in tinting windows. It’s lucrative. I’m working a 10-month government temp job in Raleigh and picking up shifts at a bowling alley on Hillsborough Street for extra cash. Kyle gets a share of the car detail business, and is now co-owner. He buys a house. A boat. I develop a cocaine habit because it feels adult and luxurious, a way to escape from the fact that my life is moving forward, but there’s no real action. Kyle’s wife gives birth to a daughter. I kick the cocaine habit and start going back to church to clean myself up.

Meanwhile Kyle’s leg is killing him. Little, painful moments that won’t go away. The opiods help but are also a way to escape. Have you ever taken a walk high on pain pills? The sunshine feels amazing. I would know because I snuck some out of my aunt’s drawer once when I was bored at home one Christmas break in college.

Not much of the prescription candy came through the small college town of Clemson, though, so it was just a fling. Fayetteville on the other hand is right off I-95, the super highway that connects drug lords from Florida to New York. The same route that would bring Raleigh the cocaine that I was fortunate to kick. The same one that brought Oxycontin and it’s cousin, heroine, which is cheaper and stronger. A small but important difference. The dealers know to make a pitstop in Fayetteville where the military boys are always a little thirsty for something. Kyle decides he needs something stronger but cheaper. He scores.

I move to Charleston where my hard work and optimism lands me my first salaried job with health insurance. I take improv classes and start getting into comedy festivals. My solo show tours the east coast. I find myself in Charleston’s creative circle of comedians, writers, musicians, theater performers. Kyle loses the boat. The house. The business. His wife and daughter.

It takes time and a couple brushes with the law, but Kyle tightens up, gets clean. Another dot on the timeline of our lives, just a little further apart. Different versions of the same life.

In August 2017 I’m walking around my neighborhood off Upper King Street, the sunshine feels amazing—like those Christmas break walks, but better—as Kyle tells me this good news on the other end of the phone. I share some good news of my own: I’m moving to New York to pursue my dream of becoming a comedy writer. We’re proud of each other: our hard work and optimism seems to be paying off, even with the bumps along the way.

But his mind and body aren’t forgiving. Maybe it’s the loneliness from a divorce of his own, or the stress of having to build a new life—which also means confronting his past mistakes. Maybe he’s just bored or the neural receptors in his brain won’t leave him alone. I don’t think about the moment he decided to go back, the moment he relapsed—I think about the moment all the pain finally, truly ended. The moment he closed his eyes on September 11, 2017, a couple weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday.

The ironic thing about memories is that the more we try and recall them, the less clear they become. This isn’t a poetic speculation, it’s science. An article in The Journal of Neuroscience found that “a memory of an event can grow less precise... with each retrieval.”

The more we try to recall our memories, the less we are able to remember them. They’re fragile, like glass, shaking in a thunderstorm.

The more I try to remember the moments I had with Kyle, the less I’ll actually be able to remember them. But I will remember that I remember them, which is what we call knowing.

I know that he is back there. He’s back at the very beginning. My very beginning. That is where my cousin Kyle is, and where I will always remember him: in my very first moment, we are together.

Kyle and I at the mountain house in North Carolina.