Dear Brother I Love You

Dear brother/brethren/brotato/broseph/A”bro”ham/Jack –

The straight-up, hard and cold, honest fact is just this one: grown-ups aren’t usually very close with their siblings. There are exceptions, but generally, they’re just not. And we’re both more grown-ups than we are kids (how did this happen? I did not give anyone my approval on growing. I wasn’t done being innocent and crazy and playing in the woods after school, but then again I never would be if they let me go back). I’m scared of not being close with you because I like you so much.

I get kind of anxious every time I think about how close we were when we were little and we shared a room that we never ever cleaned and had feet fights and weren’t allowed to say “stupid” or “shut up” and sometimes wore matching clothes and played pretend games (you always wanted your name to be Zack, which is silly because it’s your own name with just one letter changed) and had the same friends and blamed things on each other and weren’t allowed to drink soda. I don’t get anxious because of the memories; I get anxious because I don't want to forget them and I’m afraid of not making new ones.

It took one and a half years of me being in college and separated from you and our house (and the rest of our whole family too!) for me to realize that this is our new normal. I thought that me being gone at school was just a temporary thing because everything is just the same whenever I’m at home. But you visiting me yesterday in my college world made me realize that this is us. You’re going to college next year and we’ll be together on breaks still but this is the part where we have to go be grown-ups. Key word: go.

We have to leave our house (I had to leave first and you had to stay alone in the basement but your turn is next) and learn how to take care of ourselves and manage money (so that we don’t run out of gas all the time because I did that last weekend and it was not very pretty) and eat food that has nutrients in it and be civil to people who are sometimes jerks. From now on, we’re only going to see each other sporadically. It will be a joyous occasion every single time we are reunited, but still, we will probably never see each other as often as we did when we rode to school listening to mega-hipster music together in high school or when we watched Scamper the Penguin on slow summer afternoons when I was eight and you were six. And that makes me sad.

The same people hoped for us and prayed for us and let us live in their house even when we ruined all of their stuff (remember when you carved your name into the coffee table and told them that I did it and they didn’t even believe you? Yup, me too). We turned out the same but different. We have the same eyes and we say the same weird things sometimes and we both like mangoes a whole lot.

Even if you live in Alaska or Michigan or New Zealand (all somewhat realistic options) and I live in the southern part of the US (I must be warm) or somewhere happy in Europe, you’ll still be my brother. Even if we only get to see each other every ten years (which is a really long time to go without seeing each other), technology exists, which is convenient for people separated by long distances, and we’ll always have the same blood in common.

Even if we run out of things to talk about, we can just make some tea and then I can breathe into it and make my glasses be foggy and then we can laugh about it together. There’s always that.

I enjoy all of the minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years that I get to be with you. I enjoy that you like to make pterodactyl sounds at night in the car with the windows open and that you sometimes paint my nails for me and that you sleep with your eyes open and I really just like you as a person. You’re a cool one even if you are sometimes dumb. I like that we’re both blind in one eye, because it’s really cool and really weird. I think maybe we should quit real life and go be pirates. I love you.

Love,
Lauralicious