Note: I had originally intended this to be a character portrait of a certain cousin until I realized that what I’ve typed below is too lengthy for an introduction.
Unlike everybody, I can state with a good deal of certainty that I am not close to my cousins. It is a kinship I would most precisely put into words as amiable, but likewise inert and distant. The prevalent gap in our ages would in all likelihood be the closest reason I could attribute this aloofness to. As I was growing up, most of them were already in their college years, and so when I eventually recognized how unusual our relationship was, they were already living lives apart from the scope of a family. The few ones whose ages are near mine dwell in the province, affording us little time to create tight-knit ties.
If anything, I never sought to distance myself from them. Were that distance to be quantified, it’d be apparent by a healthy margin that I am friendlier to my cousins in my maternal side. What perhaps largely contributes to this inclination is the generation overlap between me and the daughters of my one particular auntie. We don’t talk often yet when I come by their place, they make sure they engage my attention by having me in their bedroom while the grownups catch up on the lost time. What the small talks fail to bridge are filled in with the sounds of the television tuned to the channel they think I would have opted if I spoke more openly and comfortably to them. This happens as frequent as a child dares to curse in front of her parents, so one can easily imagine how it fares between me and the rest of my cousins.
As it happens however, I am the sole one with a case like this among my siblings. One would have thought my middle sib, who I’ve written about a handful of times, as an exception because of the limitation posed by her disability but I think it is highly-relevant to the matter at hand that I note that she is held fondly by my aunties and cousins. My eldest sister (which much to my current surprise, I haven’t mentioned not even once in any of my entries), on the other hand, had grown up warmly with some of them, landing her on a floor a league atop my small talk level. I was a kid who played with tea sets alone within the confines of our home, so though we used to live in a compound with my paternal cousins, they were strangers to me as much as the kids living from across the street.
Family gatherings are substantial wells of idle time for me. In fact, they are generally fun but I wish the future ones will exceed the stale enjoyability of the previous. If I am not seen fulfilling my duties in eating and gracing pictures with my presence, I am likely found roving my gaze while awaiting for a cousin whose interest for a short chatter I will rouse. I was never at the questioning end of a conversation and I had mastered my role so well that my prediction for how it’ll proceed had never been wrong– or rather, it has taken the same path everytime. They would ask about my course in college, then my family and finally, leave to search for a more meaningful conversation. Yup, they forget my course every single time, of which I am actually glad since it entails further seconds of zero awkwardness.
If you were expecting this entry to boil down to me saying that I yearn to be close to them, I won’t. I don’t see how its materialization at present would bring change to the past seventeen years I grew up without their fond regard. But just so you know, never did I shut my mind off at the idea.