My brother is 26 today. I search back through my memory of all the stories I could tell about him to try to find one that is important when the truth is that a moment wasn’t what was important, but all the of them put together side by side.
Like Wes playing dress-up with me and my best friend. I remember running up and down our carpeted stairs on Prairie Street with floppy hats on our heads and fake pearls around our necks. Or watching Pokemon together in the front room. Putting on a play in the dining room. The way he’d flood his pancakes with syrup until they were more soup than stack. Watching our babysitter teach us to spell happy H-A-P-P-Y. That his favorite colors were orange and purple and that when we were at Bright Start daycare together the teachers would let me go into his classroom as they were going down for a nap so I could kiss him on his forehead.
And those were just the first few years of now 26 years of sibling-hood, years he was mostly too young to remember.
But here’s a memory from later that I warm-up on rainy days. Me fourteen-ish, him twelve-ish, sitting in my room in Highland Drive, where he tells me I’m his best friend. I don’t know when we stopped fighting each other growing up, but it was somewhere right before this.
And here’s a memory the holds me when I feel unheld. Coming home crying at lunch from work and Wes tells me not to go back and takes me to the botanical gardens instead. We walk the trails and play PokemonGo and I pray that you all have a little brother that kind.
I love, love being a big sister but not as much as I love, love having a little brother. Who’s 26 today. And deserves a good year, and a good life, because when I think of a good person I think of him.
With Love,
Natalie