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There's quite a difference, isn't there?

Between what was and what should have been?

Because there is a lot of one, but there is an infinity of the other!

-Dr. Who, The Rings of Akhenaten

There are days now that I can't forget, no matter how hard I try.  April 10th is one of those days.  Today would have been my brother Jonathan's thirty-third birthday.  Last year, I opened with the above Dr. Who, and I will again this year, because the amount of what should have been is rapidly growing.  The fact that I find my brother's birthday unavoidable is one sign.
I was proud of myself because I remembered to send a happy birthday text to my sister a few weeks ago.  Her birthdays are not as terribly significant to me, because she's here, because I can exchange a brief message and let her know that I am glad she's here.  Which honestly, given that I am who I am, is probably about what I would be doing with Jon today.
Grief about this particular loss has long since ceased being generative, now it's just sort of like poking around the space where you've lost a tooth with your tongue, I really can't help doing it.  Which is why I write these little birthday epistles; I'm poking around to see if anything is different, or if it's just still that big empty.
What I've been thinking about a lot lately, is vacations.  I see that a lot of grown up brothers take vacations together.  I assume that, by now, Jon would be married and have a couple little ones, and we would rent a house at the beach or go camping or something of that ilk.  I don't imagine that we would be best friends, we never really were that way, but I sort of like the idea of annoying each other for one week a year.
It's an example of how an absence can get so much bigger than the presence ever was.
Whatever else Jon was, he was fun most of the time.  He never wanted to sit still, and he had a way of pulling people together and enlisting them in his ideas, me included.  As I creep towards forty, I sense the presence of an absence: someone to enlist me in doing stupid things.
It's really amazing how different two people with so much genetic material in common can be.  I have always been a thinker.  I'm already planning what sort of underwear I'm going to take with me on the Camino de Santiago next spring.  That's right, a year ahead of time, I'm weighing the options for my choice of undergarments, and I am not ashamed (well maybe a little, but not enough to keep me from admitting it).
Jon was a doer.  He spent a lot of money he didn't really have on going to Fiji on a surfing expedition, and he found out that he wasn't a good enough surfer for Fiji.  He spent more money he didn't have on a Honda CBR 750 that looked dangerous sitting still, and he admitted, in a candid moment, that the bike scared him a little.
I have never done anything so impulsive.  The closest I have come is buying a pop-up camper, which I have spent more time regretting than actually using.  I'm not cut out for impulsion, which is why I needed my brother to stick around.  To get me to do stuff without looking (three hundred times) before I leap, to stop me from thinking about every stupid thing way too much, to allow me to brush off April 10th with a simple text message instead of thinking about everything that should have been, but isn't.
All those things that should have been, but never were, mount up, drip after drop into an infinite bucket, and I take a day a year to write a few paragraphs and say Happy Birthday Molebutt.