Reimagining: The Evolution of My Brother

Written from the perspective of the brother.

          I used to have this overwhelming sense that my sister wanted to kill me. 

          When I say she wanted to kill me, I mean she either wanted to kill me herself or wouldn’t really care all that much if I just ended up six feet under the ground. Just as long as she could make sure she had her friends and her grades and her nice California school.
          I remember submitting this poem about her once. Something about how I fought back when she chased me with a scary metal object. She was never meant to read that poem, but her slightly positive response to it did not make me feel half bad. It was like she appreciated me for something more than just being her brother, but for acknowledging her identity beyond those barriers. I began to see her as my sister, not just a sister.
          She is older than me, used to be taller and bigger but by now I have passed her up by a few inches. I got acne, a best friend, and even a few girlfriends while she got finals, her heart broken, and her first real paycheck.

—

          One time when my sister was in 4th grade, our parents bought us a toy train set. We were flipping out when we discovered all of the possibilities with a toy train: it could crash, we could tie someone to the tracks and watch it slowly run into them, we could pretend to be Godzilla and destroy the tiny cardboard town and cardboard people, but what we really wanted was snow. It was winter time and that year we barely got any snow at all. So we decided to DIY our own snow. Naturally, the box came with a beautiful array of styrofoam slabs that, funnily enough, looked like snow to our inventive eyes. Tearing it to shreds, we sprayed it all over the floor and the little train town. She kept yelling at me that I was shredding the styrofoam all wrong and the pieces were way too big, snatching it away a few times. I mostly ignored it, easily finding something else to focus my rambunctious energy on. Later, we lay on the floor together, rubbing messy styrofoam angels into the cream carpet. Safe to say our mother was not very happy, but we had inhaled way too many styrofoam kernels to regret our faux snow show.

—

          Sometimes I could not tell what she was thinking. I guess I realized that I never really thought about it all that much, what was going through her head, I mean. For some reason, I always thought we were generally on the same page about everything. Every now and then I almost see a glimmer of what seems to be guilt or sadness. The day when she read my poems felt weird. My weak, incredibly mediocre but scarily unexciting poetry seemed to move mountains in her in a way that I had not seen before. I often wonder why she felt that mystery emotion at that moment, but it touched something else inside me as well: compassion.

—

          When I was around 10 or 11, I had this problem where I would hold my breath when I chewed food and a thunderous mewling noise would escape my breathless mouth. My sister could not stand me when I did that, calling me Darth Vader and all sorts of kind names. A few weeks later, I heard the khh-puhh at the dinner table but it definitely did not come from me. It was my sister. At first, I fully thought it was a ploy to mock me, but when our dad got on her about it, she quickly pointed the finger at me. I was fed up with her saying mean things about me and ran to my bedroom. A few minutes later, I heard a knock on the door.

          “I’m sorry.”

          I refused to respond to her. I wanted to forgive her, but I knew I could not crack that easily. She sat on the edge of my bed, close to my dangling legs.

          “I am very sorry,” she whispered close to her chest.
          “Huh?”
          “I just wanted to apologize for throwing you under the bus for something you didn’t do. It was not cool and I am sorry.”
          I finally looked her in the eyes, acknowledging her words.
          “Darth Vader is pretty cool anyway. But be careful, I think I just might have a better impression.” (She did not).

—

 

         My sister has evolved into something bigger to me. Being attached to her so young got me stuck in a little bubble of the person I thought her up to be. When she left for college, I noticed that the sister I dreamt up in my imagination, my drawings of me and her skateboarding (she sucks at it), and even my dumb little poems about her were not necessarily untrue, they were just too narrow. Her being physically away created distance, more than just mile-wise. But that distance allowed for my sister who chased me with a big metal thing and teased me about Darth Vader to become my sister who looks forward to our short phone calls and genuinely enjoys my company without being forced. She cares about me. She wants to be my sister.
          I evolved. And so did my sister. We evolved together.