Siblings

She said it is strange that we aren't better friends because we have so much in common. She's right. It is. We do. We both have that insatiable hunger inside us to create. We're both social, even if it is in different ways. We're both smart and for the most part, reasonable. We're also both impulsive and adventurous. We find the same things funny. We know how to laugh with each other and at ourselves. We share a common history. We have both felt that loss of family.

For whatever reason, I have very few memories of us as children. I imagine we must have been closer then, playing together in the backyard until sundown, creating adventures under forts of pillows on rainy afternoons, delighting in Christmas mornings together, exploring the park across the street as intently as the foreign countries our parents took us to. I remember these experiences, but not what it felt like to share them with my little brother, not the looks on his face, not the joy in his eyes. I can't seem to remember him at all.

On Thursday morning, I pressed play on the stereo in the baby room. A song came on from James and the Giant Peach. James began to sing "my name is James..." and suddenly, I was in the back of our van with my little brother driving to West Virginia for my first experience at sleep away camp. My brother was singing this very song in a British accent that I could never pull off, despite my best efforts. My sides were aching from laughing, tears rolling down my cheeks. I remembered, for an instant, what it felt like to grow up with him.

Things didn't change until later, until he began to discover he wanted nothing to do with the life he was living, until he cast aside the only life I knew. Harry is three years younger than I am, and has been, since the age of twelve (if not even earlier), cooler than I will ever be. He feared nothing. He learned quite young that things like age and race and social status mean nothing where friendship is involved. He can talk to anyone, about anything. He can find connections with all types of people in all walks of life. He can be exactly who he wants to be, exactly who he is, without any of the insecurities or guilt that seem to plague my every move. I am so jealous of that, of him.

I was jealous too, of all of my friends who had younger siblings who looked up to them. I was jealous when they started to bring them out to their first parties, when they began introducing them into their social worlds, when they got to be depended on. Harry was never like that. He had his own parties, his own social worlds, his own experiences. He didn't need me. He didn't want any of the things I felt I had to offer him as his older sister. He was already living his life before I had time to define my own.

He thought my life was small, which it was. He didn't find contentment in that the way that I did. It didn't comfort him to have a select group of friends that he knew better than anyone. He wanted to know everyone. He wanted to go out and explore. He wanted more out of life. He wanted big things.

At the time, I hated him for it. I didn't understand his need for more. I was happy and certain that my happiness entitled me to preach about the "right way" to live. I was young and sheltered. I had so much to learn, but had yet to discover the desire to learn it, the way he had, the way he continues to desire and search.

He was fourteen when he moved out of the house. At the time, I saw my parents as allowing it. I saw them as ignoring the problem. I saw their lack of action as a lack of caring. I blamed them for all of it. Their absence of rules, of punishment, of consequences had allowed him to become a person who knew no boundaries. I was the extreme opposite. I loved boundaries, reveled in them, lived my life by them. They made me feel safe, knowing those concrete rights and wrongs I had set for myself. I was sheltered between their lines.

And between those lines, I believed I understood everything. I believed that his life was wrong and that mine was right. I believed I was the only one who was even trying to save him. So I took on the role of playing mother. I pleaded with him to come home. I yelled at him. I told him he was making mistakes. I thought that was what I had to offer him as his big sister. I thought that if I couldn't introduce him to the social world, the least I could do was introduce him to the responsible one, the reasonable one, the one where good things happen to good people.

I really believed such a place existed. I really believed that if you did what you were supposed to do, impressed those you were supposed to impress, played by their rules, that your life would be guaranteed happiness. It seems foolish now, somehow, to have ever believed it was all so simple.

Things were never quite the same between Harry and me after that. We grew apart. We just seemed too different. He understood things then that I am only growing to learn now. He saw that there was a bigger world out there, one filled with injustices and experiences I had yet to know existed, one in which there is no such thing as concrete rights and wrongs.

Still, on Christmas when I found him locked in the bathroom, crying over the state of our family, over the lack of it, I wanted to hold him in my arms as a big sister should hold her little brother. I wanted to tell him that everything would be alright. I wanted him to know how proud of him I am, how amazing he is, how it is an honor to be his sister. I wanted to protect him within the boundaries of my love. I wanted him to know that we are not so different, that I too have spent time crying in the bathroom, that I too understood our loss. I wanted him to understand that it is OUR loss. I wanted him to feel, within the deepest parts of him, that no matter what has happened, or will happen, he will always be my little brother.

And I will love him always for being just that.