My parents tell me I was a wild child. To be more exact, as a two-year-old, I was constantly singing and dancing around the house with my head of blonde curls, in absurd outfits as Cinderella dresses with aviators and my mother’s high heels. I even see it today firsthand when the radio blares in my bedroom or when I’m with my friends and I cannot contain my laughter. The spontaneous side of me has always been a part of my DNA.

However, I am also a very cautious person who needs to be walked off a ledge here and there. I have always hated roller coasters, horror movies, the dentist and elevators (just to name a few). In fact in an old home movie of the day my first brother was born, in the background I can hear my dad asking my grandmother why we were late coming to the hospital. My grandmother exclaims with a tired sigh, “There was some trauma in the elevator.” The camera then turns to me, clad with a Barney t-shirt covered in denim overalls, a red face, tear-stained cheeks and my frown looks like the Gateway Arch. Clearly, I didn’t like “exciting things," or I wasn’t a thrill seeker as some would say, as well as not being the center of attention anymore.

So to this day, I see myself as a type of paradox. I am someone who lives for fun and adventure, but I am also someone who lives around distress and caution. As a young child, so outrageous, as a young adult, so timid.

I felt the same way when my youngest brother Evan was born. I was delighted, but so disenchanted. I had planned on having a younger sister since the day my mother announced her pregnancy. Since I already had a younger brother, Connor, two years my junior, I wanted a sister. I didn’t want a sister just to have a sister, either. I wanted a younger sister to teach everything to and to do everything with; to paint nails with, to play dolls with, to pat her back when she crossed the obstacles I had, to ponytail her braids with, to part my princess dresses with, to perform skits with, to perfect my life with. Her name would be Megan, my parents determined. Megan, I used to think, Megan. My best friend.

For the nine months my mother was pregnant, the 6-year-old me had run around the house, drawing pictures in shades of pink crayons and saving piles of my old clothes in the corner of my room. I guess I should have paid more attention when the man in scrubs told me, “It could be a boy, too.”

So, February 16, 2003, 2:15 in the afternoon, I was concentrating on a puzzle of a fish bubbling underwater alongside my father’s father. My father’s mother was reading a magazine in the kitchen in her old granny’s glasses that she still wears today. Connor was noisily playing with his Matchbox cars in the den. The phone rang. Someone answered.

I got the news I had a new brother, Evan Vincent Silvia. Of course, I was happy in the moment. I jumped up and ran around the dining room table. Connor and I screamed with glee. I can still remember the moment as I sit in my living room, the very same living room today.

But then I saw my drawings in pink scattered near my puzzle. I remembered my pile of neatly stacked dresses in the corner of my bedroom. I remembered the crib in which I put my favorite stuffed animal, Freckles. I remembered my plans of playing house and dress up - girls only. I remembered my best friend. I remembered my plans for my new sister Megan.

The thoughts flooded my memory. My memory interrupted my thoughts. I quietly walked over to the puzzle I had been working so diligently on, and undid each piece, stacking each piece atop one another while my grandparents and brother celebrated.

The next day we were going to see my new sibling and mother at the hospital. I burnt my index finger on the curling iron that morning. I remember sobbing in the car, claiming, “It just hurts so, so bad.” I think it was less of the burn penetrating into the fibers of my finger, and more of my heart cracking while a smile was to be plastered over my face.

Once we arrived at the hospital, I remember the smell of scrubs and chemicals wafting deep into the crevices of my senses. This time around my family complied to take the stairs, obeying my phobia of elevators. I was so excited when we finally reached my mother’s room, although my family and I were short of breath and tired from taking the stairs. I truly was relieved to see her face after a day’s time, which really felt more like years.

Finally, after a long scene of hugs and kisses, my father and his father brought back Evan from the nursery.

And, when I first laid my eyes on him, I saw a face of innocence, a gesture of love, a beginning of an everlasting friendship. My despair over the sister I would never have immediately vanished, a feeling I thought I would never experience.

This moment was luckily captured in a photo, and I always look at this photo when I need a spirit of hope in my life. Minutes before this photograph was taken, I had no hope that I would ever be happy with another brother, but the smiles in the photo show that anything is possible. The stranger in the photo is someone I never imagined I would be -an older sister to two younger brothers, and joyful about it, creating a friendship from its roots. The stranger in the photo shows me hope and uplifts me when I am struggling in life and cannot find a glimmer of faith. When I see this photo, I feel that anything can happen, and I will find my way in even the darkest of times.

From the day Evan came home from the hospital, all I did was spend time with him. I would spend hours just sitting on the blue couch in the living room, holding him delicately in my arms, as if he were an expensive doll I had just received as a gift. His skin was as soft and warm as the blanket in my bedroom. His thin strands of hair were as soothing as milk before bed. His eyelashes fluttered as gracefully as a butterfly’s wings during sunrise.

As he grew older, our bond only strengthened. Although I couldn’t paint his nails or braid his hair, I could teach him how to play basketball or how to walk. And sometimes, even to this day, I feel a prick in my chest when Connor and Evan do “boy things” together, but I always know how special I am to each of them, and how together, all three of us share an unbreakable relationship, and our friendship will last until the stars die out and beyond.

Today, my brother is 11 years old. I love him dearly, and still think he has the softest cheeks and the most adorable smile an 11-year-old could possibly have. Despite the fact that I never met my Megan, my once promised best friend, I feel that I have someone even better. I wish we would never grow up some days, and I wish that our hours of fun could last forever.

And so, I am a paradox. I am someone who can be surprised, but then overwhelmed. I am someone who can make a promise, but can barely keep a bubbling secret inside of me. I am someone who has a great memory, but is easily confused. I say once I graduate high school, I am never turning back, but then I find myself being the only one calling my mom to say goodnight during band trips. I say that it's okay to fail and try again, but then I remember the gut-wrenching pain I felt when a best day turned to the worst day as I failed my driver’s test, a 17-year-old’s worst nightmare, still haunting me today.

And I am still the extravagant, shy child my parents say I was. That’s something that I think will never change, not even with the ages I surpass. But throughout all of my ups and downs, and left and rights, my brother Evan turned out to be my best friend (of course along with Connor). Things not always turning out how they seem has become my life’s greatest lesson, something any paradoxical person like myself can take to the grave.