How to love a brother

I remember being 12 and going to a birthday party with the popular girls. I wanted to be popular too. My mom told me I had to take my little brother. I was so embarrassed, I ignored him during the whole party. She was angry that I was mean to him.

When he died my mom told me my brother didn’t think I loved him.

Maybe my mom knows things. But she wasn’t there all the time. Maybe some things we kept hidden from others. We were a secretive family after all. There are even some secrets I kept from myself.

She wasn’t there when I went to get tattoos with him because he didn’t want her to know. I got a tattoo too, not because I wanted one, but because I didn’t want my brother to feel like he was alone.

She wasn’t there when I noticed every sign of him slipping, and deep down I felt like something bad was going to happen. When he was taking entrance exams for high school and gave up before trying, I organized an event for the new students so they wouldn’t be afraid of high school. When he didn’t know what to do for his career, I volunteered at a mental health hospital and gave a reference for him.

And she wasn’t there when he said he wanted to be just like me, because I was the best person he knew. And she didn’t know I spent my whole life trying to be that person he saw in me. That person that is so inspiring that it makes people who want to die want to live again.

She wasn’t there when I texted him that I loved him and I would never be happy again if he died, after the first time he was hospitalized for telling his friend that he wanted to kill himself.

So I’m starting to think, because she wasn’t always there, she doesn’t know what happened between me and my brother. No one outside of us will understand what we went through, together, through his 10 year journey into depression. How much he needed me when he threatened to kill me. How much I loved him when I told him I didn’t want to be his sister anymore.

My brother who came into my perfect life as a newer, cuter, version of me. Who demanded to be loved in new and strange ways every day while he was alive, and even stranger ways after death.

Was I a good sister? or a bad sister? I don’t know. But I was his sister, and I was his sister very, very much.