lucybychoice

01-09-2026

Oh, it's been a while!

I am listening to Rocco And His Brothers by Mi Loco Tango. I still haven't seen the film and I'm not sure if this song is even in it, but my mom recognized it when I played it over break and told me to watch the film. Anyway. It's fitting because that's what I want to talk about today: my brother. And him growing up. He doesn't know about this blog, nor (I don't think) about the thoughts I will share today, but maybe he'll stumble upon it, or I'll send him the piece, in which case, hi! We're talking about you.

My prof for my 'motivation' psych class said that one of his new year's resolutions was to improve his relationship with his sibling. I won't do what he did and display my text conversations with my own brother to everyone, but it's essentially the same goal I went into the holidays with.

My relationship with my brother isn't bad. I actually think we get along quite well. But we have a four-year age gap and while we were very close in elementary school, we grew apart once I got to middle and later high school. I didn't know how to talk to him when I was 15 and he was 11! At older ages, it was much easier to relate to my sister, who is only two years older; simply being in high school at the same time allowed for easier understanding of each other's lives.

Unfortunately, my four-year gap with my brother meant that by the time he entered high school, I was leaving the house, city, country, for university. Ah, it broke my heart. I couldn't wait to move out for a multitude of reasons; he was the singular one making me want to stay. Over the next year or two, he grew, a growth I could catch glimpses of every few months, but otherwise that I mostly missed. Maybe it's because I wasn't there, maybe it's just how things are, but we grew even more apart during those early years apart. We didn't text or call, ever, I was quite focused on myself during that time and paid less attention.

But now we're almost four years removed from the day I left, and all of a sudden he's standing in front of me a man. He swapped out his glasses for contacts, has an established fashion sense. He has a bank account, has gone through a whole relationship, talks about moving to Italy. It had been looming (literally–he's much taller than me) yet still took me by surprise. And the first few days I spent at home were the first, out of all the times I came home for break, that I wasn't sure if I recognized him.

I'm being dramatic. Of course I recognized him. But still, there was something different, I could almost grab hold of it. The question became: how do I start this new relationship with him? Indeed, he wasn't a child anymore, and that was new. I felt like I almost had to start over.

I recruited my cousin. I felt I needed a third party to open up the conversation. It was weird to be asking my brother who his friends were, what he liked to study in school, if he was still playing tennis or if he had switched to weightlifting full-time. If he was seeing someone, where he was looking at colleges. All these felt like things I was supposed to know already, and not knowing them was scary. And most importantly, I didn't know how to ask. We met my cousin on a ski trip and the conversation opened.

Brr, it was weird. Not in a bad way, I was happy to hear about my brother's life. But it was concrete confirmation that he was an adult now.

Then the week that followed had a different message. I realized this notion that all of a sudden he was different was all in my head. That my worries in starting a conversation were self imposed and unfounded. That he'd grown, yes, of course, but deep down he hadn't changed. He was still, always, my brother.

We've lived a lot of things since the time we would play Legos down in the musty basement of our first place in Brooklyn. They tore down that house recently. I'd love to throw myself at the ground sobbing and pretend all those memories are lost, but that's just not true; they live on in my head, in my brother's, and in the bond that we still have, all those years later, that never faltered, maybe took more of a backseat role but never disappeared. He was in my dream last night, maybe in anticipation of writing this, and I was glad.

My brother never stopped being my brother. But one thing did change, one new thing did appear:

he became my friend.

lucybychoice