All that emotion so late at night was a bit too much for both of us. Neither one of us was ready to stand on our own, and so we clung to each other at a loss of what to do next. Part of it was a concrete dilemma – figuring out the mechanics of a well-timed hug. We so rarely hugged that neither of us wanted to be responsible for ruining the moment.

Another part of me – an irrational, childish part of my psyche – didn’t want to let go. It was as though I had been drowning in the middle of the sea and finally latched on to a piece of driftwood. Flimsy, less than ideal, and a temporary fix at best. But that was what I needed at the moment, and so I held on to Kris with all that I had.

As I hugged my brother, I became acutely aware of how much he had grown in the past few years. His chest was broader, to the point where I could barely wrap my arms around him. And yet, there was a muscled leanness to him that had not been there before. I could feel his bones cutting through his skin and his shirt. A strange combination brought about by complementary forces of poor diet and hard labor.

It surprised me. I had seen the changes in him, seen him outgrow his clothes and flippantly inspect the prominent ridges of his ribs, but it was almost as if those changes were only made real to me by physical touch. All these changes. I had been vaguely aware of his, as I’m sure he had been vaguely aware of mine. Even when his face had been in front of mine, I had seen him only from the periphery, from the corner of my eye.

I wondered if he was aware that I had grown taller. I no longer had to strain my neck to look up at him. My brother was finally within my reach, I realized.

Of course, the hug didn’t change anything in practical terms. We were still teetering on the brink of poverty, my brother still hadn’t told me anything about his job, and our apartment was a mess of broken glass and overturned furniture.

But as I looked around the room, I knew that it would be clean by morning.

Perhaps Kris felt me looking around. Perhaps he saw what I saw too. Either way, when we stepped away from each other, it felt like the natural thing to do.

Because there was an apartment to clean, a conversation to be had, and two lives to be fixed.

As it turned out, my brother and I were better multitaskers than I had thought.