My Brother & Me

I think this image captures the spirit of
my relationship with my brother PERFECTLY.

I'm writing this post because my brother and I share a lot of friends and acquaintances, and they do ask why we don't get along. It's all about perception, really. If you ask us, we'd tell you that we get along perfectly fine!

My brother and I have never been what you would call close. Well, that's slightly inaccurate — we have an unusual relationship that no one seems to understand except for us. I'll try my best to explain the way we act towards one another, and lift some of the veil on our actually quite loving, in its way, relationship.

I was the quiet child — he was the monkey. I have never broken a bone — his head was cracked three times by the time he was three (he was a rambunctious baby). He asked everyone "Why?" — I read everything I could to keep from asking that question.

This is hard to put into words, but I'll try my best. My brother and I share things in a most intimate way in plain sight. We seem to talk in our own special language that no one else seems to understand; lots of oblique references to shared experiences, gestures, eye contact — they all mean something to us that others would not follow in a normal conversation.

Our mother keeps trying to "fix" our relationship, without really understanding that it's not broken. She and her brother call each other regularly and talk about what's going on in their lives. We... don't really need to. I can say more to my brother in five words than some people say to theirs in three months with regular phone calls. We aren't telepathic; more like, we just know a lot about each other by how each other feels in a situation and by eye contact. We don't have to put into words what we already know.

When we do talk to each other it is often interrupted by eye contact that speaks volumes. We talk a lot in "snark," or supreme sarcasm, that has a fine edge on it. You could easily interpret all of that sarcasm as trying to cut each other to ribbons (our mother cringes to hear us talk to one another), but we are actually having a most meaningful conversation with that snark. When you know each others' demons by name, why bother trying to pretend that they don't exist? It's the most intimate knowledge of another human being.

We share the knowledge, without us really having to say it to one another, that if one really needed the other, we'd be there before anyone else would. He's bored by the mundanities of life, and really just wants nothing more than have those kept to oneself. A lot irritates him, but not much excites him, so why try to get him to be excited about anything?

I'll always be the moon to my brother's sun. I'll always detest meat on my pizza while he can't get enough pepperoni. I'll always be shorter than he was at nine years old.

I'll always be his older sister, and we're both OK with that.