I was paralyzed by fear in the doorway of my bedroom. My small, bare feet were planted safely to the carpet of the enclosed, dim hallway, and in front of me was the open door to my pitch-black bedroom. I took a deep breath, contemplating my next move very carefully. As I stared off into the abyss of complete darkness, I pictured my hand-me-downed copy of Judy Bloom sitting pristinely on my stale, unmade bed. I needed my book, but I couldn’t enter the darkness alone, and the switch that would solve all my problems, sending the demons into hiding, was located on the wall parallel to the door. My six-year–old imagination started to run wild like a swarm of bees infesting my brain. I imagined goblins and goons eagerly awaiting my first step over the threshold, to nip and claw at my exposed feet. That cloud of belief was enough for me to pivot my feet a hundred and eighty degrees, and run back down the sprawling hallway to recruit my brother to be my alacritous soldier. But, unlike the image of how I believed an older brother should act towards his younger sister, my brother scoffed at my pleas and called me a “scared little baby”.  It was only after my mother’s instruction to help me that he rolled his eyes indignantly and bitterly arose from his paused game of World of War Craft. As he sullenly followed me back to my original post, his own mind started to swarm, and he came up with a prank that would, unsuspectingly to him at the time, scar me for life. We stood together at the brink of my room, as his mischievous, smirking expression darted down to my Bambi-like eyes gazing back at him. When he took the first step into the ungraspable unknown, his entire body was catapulted into a frenzy of convulsions. He collapsed to the ground and started to shriek uncontrollably as his body heaved and contorted violently in front of my innocent eyes. Instinctively, my fear of darkness vanished in those few brief seconds. I rushed to his side and knelt before his seizing body, as boiling tears flooded down my cheeks. I understood that it was no time to be saying, “I told you so,” but nonetheless I felt a sense of reassurance knowing that I had been accurate about the darkness all along. I had proof lying before me, that the night had imprisoned my brother, just how I imagined it would do to me. But that realization soon crumbled into the dust that it was originally constructed by. My brother opened his eyes a few seconds later, only to see my grief-ridden face buried into his chest. Our roles immediately switched from me trying to comfort the brother whom I had thought to be a lost cause to the wrath of the night, to my actual brother trying to console his weeping baby sister from the joke that went too far. His guilt was written across his face, he felt bad; I knew he did, but no apologize could’ve granted me the will to forgive him in that moment of utter betrayal. That was the first bitter sip of what it tasted like to truly lose my brother, and after his insensitive joke, I wished that I had.
Many of the memories that I have of my brother are surrounded by animosity. In his mind, I was his annoying little sister that was too young to understand his jokes and too old to be completely manipulated, but that all changed one sweltering summer night before I started third grade. I came home from my dad’s house just like I routinely did every Tuesday evening. Dinner was already set on the enormous red oak table; I obeyed my mother’s instructions and naively sat at my designated place setting. I looked around the saucer-shaped table with eyes of puzzlement, as my mother and stepfather started to pick at their flaccid dinner. Couldn’t they see that something was missing? My brother’s place mat was not in its normal position adjacent to me, in fact it was nowhere to be seen. I immediately inquired about the perplexing situation. My mother picked up her head as if her neck somehow no longer sustained the strength to lift her cranium easefully. She managed to maintain the sound of uninterrupted scraping of her empty fork against her plate of half-cooked lasagna, as she looked at me with rigid features and depleted eyes. I could tell that she was hoping that merely the look on her face would answer my question, but it didn’t. So I asked her again.
“Where’s Austin?”
She looked down in an effort to hide the cracking of her normally unshakable voice, as she answered casually that he was spending the night at his father’s house, located in the next town over. I found this alibi to be highly unlikely, considering my brother, according to a court agreement, was only allowed to spend Thursdays and Fridays with his father. My curiosity rose like yeast filled bread baking in a stone oven, but I didn’t go on with my badgering for fear that my mother would lash out at me for saying something she clearly didn’t want to discuss. My dinner tasted bland and unpalatable, and even after finishing my plate I was still hungry. I wasn’t hungry for something as insignificant as food, but instead, the vacant dining room chair across the table from me fueled my emptiness. I knew that if my brother had been sitting in his habitual spot, our conversations would have run like two freight trains in the countryside; on completely different tracks, with only the very sparse instances where they would be forced to cross rails for a brief second, only to sprawl out once again into their own predetermined destinations. He would scarf down his food in what seemed to be one heaping forkful, and then drudgingly ask to be excused and return to his computer games. But, this night was different; the dining room was filled with the sound of silverware scraping against plates and the heavy chewing of a room occupied by people that were high strung and defeated at the same time. Later that night, once the table was cleared, my mother nonchalantly told me that my brother would be staying with his father for a while. Once again, I recognized the unpleasant taste of losing my brother, but this time I wasn’t sure when he would be back.
After many months, my brother’s absence became customary to me. I didn’t find out until a year later, the real reason why my brother had decided to move out. My mother and him had gotten into a devastating argument after my brother had announced to her that he had enlisted in the Marine Corp. This news shattered my mother’s heart and left the two of them with open wounds caused by walking over the broken fragments. Some parents see their child enlisting in the military as a great honor and blessing, but my mother saw it as a guaranteed death certificate with my brother’s name on it. Although I never openly admitted to missing him, I secretly yearned for the companionship that never was.
One day during the beginning of my sixth grade P.E. class, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. My mother always told me never to answer an unknown number, but my mother wasn’t there so I did it in spite of her. I ran to the cramped bathroom, dressed from the waist up in my school clothes, and from the waist down in my P.E. uniform. I clutched my vibrating pink flip phone under my baggy gym shorts, hoping none of the vulture-like instructors would catch me with my phone out during school hours. I locked myself in a dimly lit stall, as a hesitantly answered the device that was burning a hole in my pocket. The voice I heard on the other end was a voice I hadn’t heard in what felt like decades. It was like hearing a song on the radio, and remembering every arc and curve of the drum line and every word of the chorus, even though the last time it played must of been ages before. It was my brother. His voice wasn’t drenched in aggravation like how I had remembered it to be. His discourse was calm and loving, and just by his simple hello, I felt an abundance of joy filling my heart to the brink of bursting. I hadn’t realized how much I truly missed him until that moment. He spoke with great ease and worldly vocabulary, which elaborated his newly grown maturity that I was just now being exposed to. I desperately pressed my phone closer to my eardrum to make sure to lap up every drop of his voice. 
“I just wanted to give you a call,” he said. “I’m sure mom told you that I’m headed to Afghanistan today, but I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I’ll be back before you have time to miss me. I don’t want you to worry about me while I’m there, trust me, it’s not as bad as everyone says it is.” 
His words were enough to trigger soft tears to start to pool up in the corners of my eyes. I responded to him in a shaky voice of how much I already missed him, and despite his wish, I would worry for his life. That was the first time I had ever heard my brother tell me that he loved me, and in that moment I had no doubt in my mind that I loved him too. The remainder of our conversation consisted of him trying, inconclusively, to comfort me about the idea of him being airdropped into the middle of a war zone. He offered me ease of mind, in a time that was, undoubtedly, the most terrifying experience he had faced in his diminutive eighteen-year-old life. Even though his words were easy and soothing I could hear the slightest shake in the back of his throat that indicated his own weakness of terror. In that moment, I felt nothing but pity for the person on the other line; he was no longer the brother that I had once loathed, he was a child afraid of the darkness in his life. I understood that I could never go back and redo all those years of hatred and bitterness, but in that moment, all I could do was accept his fears and cherish his voice. I had completely lost the brother that I had grown up with, and in his place stood a young man that delivered compassion and adoration to me. As I reluctantly pushed the red button on my phone, I realized, that my childhood relationship with my brother had symbolically, metaphorically, and physically come to an end.