My brother and I have a strange relationship.

It’s rather hard to describe, as I’ve been staring at a blank sheet of paper hoping for words to come to mind for some time. Words like “loving”, “caring”, and other cheesy adjectives don’t seem to fit, especially when we’re able to easily find great amusement at each other’s failures. And the other stories people tell about how their siblings beat them up and hurl abuse at them and mock them every second they see each other, I don’t have any of those either.

I remember when we were little, back when we played with our Pikachu and Torchic stuffed animals and what-nots, when he used to tuck his legs into his shirt and hop around on his feet (again, we were five and seven years old), and I would call him “midget”, or “dwidget”, a combination of the words “dweeb” and “midget”. It used to be a running joke between us, though I can’t see what we might have found funny at all, especially when he’s now a good head taller than me, and probably will morph within the next few years into something obscenely large and alien with my brother’s face. Recently, I’ve had friends that I’ve known for years say to me innocently, “wait, I thought you were the younger sibling”, which procures an interesting expression from me, I’ve been told, and makes me reluctant to stand next to my brother in public.

We’re not like those lame siblings who have everything perfectly. I can even say that I have slapped two people before because of my brother. One person was my brother, and that I’d rather not talk about. The other person was a kid who rode our bus in elementary school, the same age as me. He thought it would be hilarious to make fun at my brother, so I slapped him, and he got in trouble.

Ever since I came to my new school, though, I’ve realized that we’ve kind of grown apart. My brother listens to basically only hard rap now, which shocked me when I learned of that this summer, and he spends a good amount of his day playing online games, hurtling insults at his computer. When I ask him now to grab me a glass of water, he calls me a loser and tells me to get one myself. And when I try to force him to get me a glass of water, he calls me a loser and tells me I fight like a wimp.

I feel like I might have lost something in our relationship when I had my back turned the last couple of years. I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that he’s going to be in high school next year, when it seemed like yesterday when we used to cower away from the high school kids at whatever Asian parties we used to attend.

Looking at him now, I don’t see what others see—a hormonal teenage boy who’s rebellious and refuses to give a care about anything—I see what I saw when I went to the hospital thirteen years ago, what I saw when he discovered at age two how fun it would be to pull my hair and color in all my books, what I saw when he yelled at this kid who was a good foot taller than him for accidentally tripping me at our first summer camp, and what I saw when I realized that he had grown so much within the past thirteen years.

Yep, I only see my brother.