Other than puberty, adolescence brought for my brother and me something of an estranged relationship. He was absorbed with carjacking on the streets of Vice City; I wasted away doodling anime characters. We didn’t hug; we exchanged punches and shoved each other not at all affectionately in the foyer. By the time he was in eighth grade and I in fourth, my brother was a full-blown bully at home. I adopted a neat survival strategy whereby I ignored anything he said and quickly left any room he entered.
It wasn’t the playful fighting ordinarily present between siblings. Our relationship was hostile, and our parents didn’t care enough to take action. Even if I tried to keep to myself in a corner of the house, he would come over, unplug the desktop, and saunter away.Then came a series of events that overturned everything I once thought of my brother. In my sophomore year I joined my school’s technical theater crew and discovered the legacy he had left behind. The upperclassmen who had known him were my means to discover the aspects to my brother’s personality to which I hadn’t before been privy, especially the brilliant, hilarious, genius aspects I didn’t know existed; all I had known were his punches and pranks at home.
There are books in which the protagonist finds in a dusty attic old diaries, photographs, and trinkets of a father or friend or lover, new perspectives of whom are quietly unearthed. My own situation was surreally similar: not diaries, but his name sprayed in graffiti lettering on the crew room walls; not sepia daguerreotypes, but show pictures printed on glossy 5x7 Kodak paper; trinkets, yes, if one holds in esteem obscene shapes rendered from plywood. He wasn’t gone from this plane, but his displacement to a university two hundred miles away made it seem so.
As I opened up to the upperclassmen on crew, the occasional you look like him became you’re just like him. I would crack a joke, and those who had known my brother and found us reciprocal would say so. To me, it was unbelievable that my brother was just like me. I had to find out more. How exactly are we similar? Your sense of humor. What was my brother like?
Just like you.
Not only at crew did this happen. It was eerie; all around me teachers who had schooled us both would comment on our similarity. Your photos have such good contrast! my photography teacher would say. Eddie had nice photos too! We don’t talk. But you’re just like him!
We shared the same snide humor and impassive delivery; the priceless one-liners; the quick wit; the competency in schoolwork and the ability to glide buoyantly as others panicked in misery.
I made these discoveries in rapid succession when he had just left for college, and I was left alone to piece together strings of clues to construct the image of a person who was but wasn’t my older brother. The day he left, I barged into his bedroom (an ominous portal at the end of the second floor hallway) to collect my spoils and was stunned by the collection of books on his nightstand: John Updike; Emily Brontë; Plato. For years I thought my brother was a moron who played too many shooter games. Apparently, he was smart, and this simple notion was astounding.
Our enmity has smoldered and we both make active albeit measly attempts to interact. Though discovering him was a quest I never meant to take, it has elicited within me respect for somebody with whom I would have otherwise denied blood relation. I no longer see my brother as a bully to evade at all costs, but rather as someone who I admire shyly from afar, someone who strangers at school have termed my brother and who I now call my brother as well.
It wasn’t the playful fighting ordinarily present between siblings. Our relationship was hostile, and our parents didn’t care enough to take action. Even if I tried to keep to myself in a corner of the house, he would come over, unplug the desktop, and saunter away.Then came a series of events that overturned everything I once thought of my brother. In my sophomore year I joined my school’s technical theater crew and discovered the legacy he had left behind. The upperclassmen who had known him were my means to discover the aspects to my brother’s personality to which I hadn’t before been privy, especially the brilliant, hilarious, genius aspects I didn’t know existed; all I had known were his punches and pranks at home.
There are books in which the protagonist finds in a dusty attic old diaries, photographs, and trinkets of a father or friend or lover, new perspectives of whom are quietly unearthed. My own situation was surreally similar: not diaries, but his name sprayed in graffiti lettering on the crew room walls; not sepia daguerreotypes, but show pictures printed on glossy 5x7 Kodak paper; trinkets, yes, if one holds in esteem obscene shapes rendered from plywood. He wasn’t gone from this plane, but his displacement to a university two hundred miles away made it seem so.
As I opened up to the upperclassmen on crew, the occasional you look like him became you’re just like him. I would crack a joke, and those who had known my brother and found us reciprocal would say so. To me, it was unbelievable that my brother was just like me. I had to find out more. How exactly are we similar? Your sense of humor. What was my brother like?
Just like you.
Not only at crew did this happen. It was eerie; all around me teachers who had schooled us both would comment on our similarity. Your photos have such good contrast! my photography teacher would say. Eddie had nice photos too! We don’t talk. But you’re just like him!
We shared the same snide humor and impassive delivery; the priceless one-liners; the quick wit; the competency in schoolwork and the ability to glide buoyantly as others panicked in misery.
I made these discoveries in rapid succession when he had just left for college, and I was left alone to piece together strings of clues to construct the image of a person who was but wasn’t my older brother. The day he left, I barged into his bedroom (an ominous portal at the end of the second floor hallway) to collect my spoils and was stunned by the collection of books on his nightstand: John Updike; Emily Brontë; Plato. For years I thought my brother was a moron who played too many shooter games. Apparently, he was smart, and this simple notion was astounding.
Our enmity has smoldered and we both make active albeit measly attempts to interact. Though discovering him was a quest I never meant to take, it has elicited within me respect for somebody with whom I would have otherwise denied blood relation. I no longer see my brother as a bully to evade at all costs, but rather as someone who I admire shyly from afar, someone who strangers at school have termed my brother and who I now call my brother as well.