My brother and I stopped talking five years ago. There was no fight. There was a gradual decrease in contact that neither of us arrested at any particular point, and then there was a silence that has now lasted long enough that breaking it would require an event.

People find this strange. The assumption is that estrangement requires a rupture - a betrayal, a confrontation, a specific wrong. Ours had none of that. It had only the steady accumulation of distance that happens when two people grow differently and stop making the effort to stay proximate. We had different politics by the time we were adults. Different relationships to our parents' house, different ways of processing the same childhood. We were not enemies. We were just not enough alike to sustain closeness without effort, and neither of us made the effort.

What I think about is the witness function. He was there for events I don't have other witnesses to - a particular summer, a stretch of years when our parents' marriage was ending and we were both in the house watching it. There is no one else alive who saw those things from inside. When we stopped talking, I lost the only other person who could verify certain memories, who could say yes, that happened the way you remember it. The archive of my early life became unconfirmable. I became the sole narrator of something that had two narrators.

I could call him. It's not impossible. But the call would have to account for five years of not calling, and the longer the silence the heavier the accounting.

Is there someone you've drifted from who was once essential to your record? What does it cost to be the only witness to your own history?