Today was one of those gloomy, grey days where it threatened to rain but didn’t. The temperatures were noticeably cooler, and the air felt a bit drier. I somehow managed to wake up for the gym at 6am despite not sleeping very well the night before. Maybe my body really can’t adjust to a three-hour time difference as easily as it has in my younger years with sleep.

Grey days are always the worst for me when I start contemplating random thoughts during everything from workout classes to browsing on the internet to just walking across the street. My thoughts always tend to drift toward Ed and all the things that went wrong for him in his life… mostly around our parents, our wider family, and all the bullying he endured as a child growing up.

Today, they circled around the fact that he wasn’t able to see our cousin’s first-born child when she was born at the hospital because of some stupid fight over a phone bill that was just $30 over the usual that my dad picked with Ed unfairly (it was my fault for not realizing that dialing a 650 area code from a 415 land line is considered “long distance; they changed the rules since the last time I did this). So our mother wouldn’t let him go in the car with them as they drive to Redwood City. The second thing I thought about today was how he didn’t get to attend our other cousin’s wedding or reception in San Jose in 2011 because our mother said he would embarrass and shame her and my dad, and she yelled, “Why would you take off work for this? It’s not that important!” I couldn’t attend because I was across the country and just came back from an expensive Europe trip, but I insisted to him then that he go… and he relented and did not.

I think it was that summer when I fully realized that my mother’s way of rationalizing things was only getting worse and worse, and it was that summer when she began making loud, public scenes, yelling at both of us in front of crowds of people. It was like the beginning of the end.

There are too many things he was deprived of that I’ll always be angry about. The list goes on forever.