“You’re my brother, you’re my friend. You’re my beginning and my end. You’re all around me when the world, turns and walks away. You’re my sunshine on a cloudy day, you’re the rain that washed the blues way. I can always count on you. You’re my brother, you’re my friend.”
This was a popular camp song that we sang just about every year at church camp and there is no better way to explain how I feel about my brother.
My brother and I have always been super close, it isn’t hard since we are only two years apart. Ever since I was born, we’ve been attached at the hip. Anywhere he went, so did I.
All of his friends were my friends (to his dismay). Any sport he played, I did too. Now that we are older, we are still really close and a lot of these still hold true. He started college two years before me and when my time came, I went to the same university.
Since I followed him to college, I jumped on his friend group too. A couple weeks ago, my brother’s fraternity needed an extra person for an intramural game of ultimate Frisbee, I jumped in. The point of all of this is that my brother and I are like two peas in a pod, or at least we were.
Now he is graduating college and going to grad school, on the other side of the country and I am not at all ready for it. The only time we ever lived apart was his first two years of college and even then, we were two hours away and I still got to see him pretty frequently.
Not only is he my brother, he is my best friend. I don’t know how to do life without him, a fact that makes this new chapter in both of our lives utterly terrifying. But amid all of this uncertainty, there is one thing that will always remain constant.
He is my brother. For the last 20 years, I have had a constant friend, teacher, confidante, bully (occasionally,) accountability partner, competitor, and buddy and he has fulfilled all these roles better than a lot of people I know. I love my brother and even though I am slightly terrified of this new chapter in his life, I am extremely excited to see where life takes us.
So brother, thank you for all you do and have done for me. So many brothers would have pretended like I didn’t exist when I tried to hang out with you and your friends, and you did for a while, but then you embraced me as one of the “bros."
Thanks for all the advice you’ve given me, for answering most of my phone calls, and for being the best big brother in the entire world. I am going to miss you so much, but I know that there is no place on this earth too far for our ESP signal to reach!
