I haven’t talked to my younger brother in years, but I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. It’s been so long that I can’t really remember much about him. If we ever did speak again, it’d be like talking to stranger on the street except we have the same facial features and receding hairline. After an ancient argument over something small enough, in retrospect, to laugh at but big enough to really hurt, he told me to lose his number and never speak to him again. Maybe I’m thinking about him because my wife and I are thinking of having another kid. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching my son play by himself in his room with Jenga blocks and hugging the teddy bear my in-laws got him for Christmas and flipping through his board books. Maybe it’s because I’ve been wondering how he’d react to having someone else his age to read with. Or someone to build and knock over towers with. Or someone to hug. Maybe it’s nothing.

I had a dream about a week ago where my brother and I were at a basement concert. We’re in our early twenties again. The house is a midcentury style affair with wood paneling and shag carpeting the sickly yellow-green color of our childhood back lawn. Sun-scorched in the high desert. Almost everyone’s eyes and fingers are glued to their phones. A mumbled and distorted series of chords clang and reverberate from an angry guitar somewhere beyond my field of vision. My perspective is as if I have a headlamp on: a circular spot directly in front of me is lit up like I’m recording everything for some low-budget documentary. Everyone is busy making AI-generated videos on their phones with prompts like “blob worm man” and “writhing squid guy on acid.” The two of us are in line to use a toaster oven on one of those tan folding tables you would see at a church Christmas party. A shirtless, hirsute dude with dark, curly hair and tattered, acid-washed jeans is spreading peanut butter on every slice of wheat bread he can get his hands on and putting them next to each other on a cookie sheet. The guy is sweating like crazy. His head is a tentacled mass of wet ringlets. Drops of perspiration whip around him like a manic sprinkler head. Out of nowhere, the toaster oven disappears, and the peanut butter toast guy loses his mind and starts throwing the bread, peanut butter side up, onto the low ceiling of the basement. My brother walks over to another table where a guy wearing a white snapback that’s barely sitting on the top of his head is fiddling and tinkering around with a comically large and boxy sewing machine sitting in an open, even larger, leather suitcase. What looks like hundreds of threads, all different shades of red, are dangling from the bobbin like guts and blood spilling out and spooling around the ribcage of the suitcase. My brother asks the snapback guy how much he’d sell the sewing machine for. The guy says $121 even. My brother pulls out his wallet, looks at me with a ridiculous smirk, and hands the guy a wad of cash with a loud clap.

I’m at a loss as to what this all means. My psychoanalyst asked me the other day what kind of peanut butter the sweaty peanut butter guy was knifing onto the bread, and I honestly couldn’t tell you. I said Jif because that’s what I’ve got in my pantry. I thought to tell him that the sweaty peanut butter guy was actually using a spoon, but I could tell my psychoanalyst was having a breakthrough, and I didn’t want to smother a good thing. He said that the peanut butter might be a representation of my relationship with my brother. You know, he said, if a jar of peanut butter sits for too long the oil separates from the peanut butter and you have to mix it up again for it to be useful. He hinted that maybe I should reach out to my brother and mix things up again. I said yeah, sure, because it seemed like the right thing to say, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

On my way home, I called my brother, but he didn’t answer.

Last night, I had another dream where my brother and I were wrestling in the living room of our childhood home. We’re battling it out. Knocking over Mom’s Precious Moments statues from the shelves and all the plastic framed family photos from the top of Mom’s Steinway Vertegrand. We’re putting holes through the drywall. We’re loud. We’re angry. We’re confused. We’re sad. We’re hot. We’re sweating under the burn of the 150-Watt light bulb in the ceiling fan that has probably been screaming into the carpet since before either of us was born. We’re huffing and puffing. We’re a couple of Kaiju leveling downtown Tokyo. And then we’re all of a sudden covered head to toe in peanut butter. Our veins are coursing with adrenaline, and we start barking like two hurt hounds. We disengage for a second, and we see each other’s faces tunneled through a telescopic lens. We’re two disparate permutations of flesh and bone scooped from the same gene pool. Our voices womp out from our mouths like Charlie Brown’s parents before we slip toward each other and grapple with a slimy slap. Four greased hands grasping for something to hold onto. Our slicked and oiled skin slides from our hands. The peanut butter glistens on our bodies like the morning sun winking off a mighty river. At the end, he’s got me in a hard half nelson. My feet are naked, sliding across the floor that’s now bare and bereft of carpet, and right before I pass out, all I can think about is how nice it is to be held tightly by someone even faintly familiar.