The brother you’ve barely heard me talk about is getting married today. I only think of him when he sends me a text or when we have our quarterly phone conversations.  A five minute call gets pretty awkward pretty quick because we would prefer to be in the same room ridiculing one another. The most fabulous thing about my brother is that we don’t speak for months and then pick up right where we left off the next time we see each other.

He tortured me in high school. I remember screaming at him for “vandalizing” my well-decorated planner with sketches of middle fingers, Happy Gilmore quotes and references to middle school boyfriends. I thought his friends were cute. They thought I was annoying.

When I went to college, he wrote me lines of poetry and prose that I often did not understand but somehow made me miss and love him. I envied his stream of consciousness writing and cursed my obsessive tendency towards proper punctuation and grammar. He would seem so philosophical one moment and then plunge into a fart joke, then segue into Paula Abdul lyrics. I imagined to be free…like Michael D.

He once regurgitated my own essay back to me at a particular fitting moment, so I must reciprocate by repeating the advice he gave to me when I was a young girl of just sixteen years old.  To my big brother and my new sister: “…long you may live and high may you fly with love in your heart and a thousand dreams under the sun.”