My Bro

My brother Everett and I get along pretty well. This hasn’t always been the case. In fact, most of our lives were spent with me attempting to kill him on a daily basis. I don’t really know why. It just seemed like the right thing to do. I guess I had a lot of pent of frustrations for various reasons and he was a little bit smaller than me, definitely less of a fighter than me and in general susceptible to me luring him into fights I always knew I could win.

I wish I could say this ended when I was in middle school, or even high school really. But, if we’re going to be honest, sometimes when I would come home from college, we’d still get into all out fights which usually ended with me screaming for Boots, my parents’ dachshund to “kill” Everett and cackling as she charged into the room and latched on to his ankle.

The fights definitely slowed though as he grew much bigger than me. I remember the first time I provoked him and he won. He actually hit me in the jaw so hard I had a bruise for days. I remember thinking that I’d hesitate the next time I went into his room with the sole intention of beating him.

With a history like this, it’s no small miracle that we can even stand to be in the same room with each other. But, now that he’s a good 6 inches taller than me and significantly stronger, I don’t really challenge him physically too often. And when I do, I’m shut down pretty quickly. And for some reason he’s decided to forgive me for a good 16 years of beatings and, after considerable thought, I’ve decided to forgive him for that bruise to my jaw.

So, we’re going to travel together for seven weeks. That’s right. Seven weeks. Seven weeks of making choices that directly affect the other. Seven weeks of all day, every day.

When I first broached this idea to Everett, his response was, “Sarah, I love you, and I’d love to hang out with you for two… three… four… five……….minutes. But seven weeks?” After a little convincing though, he’s come around. But I think he’s a little apprehensive.

Right now, he’s visiting Atlanta for a few days and tonight we decided to go for a walk in the park near my condo. Immediately there were several disputes. His total inability to understand Rosie’s leash, left me screaming at him not to kill my dachshund. Then, all of two minutes after we’d entered the park, which is in the middle of a neighborhood and has a golf course in the middle, he proceeds to tell me that he needs to relieve himself and then walks across the golf green to go pee on the other side. Seriously? I’m supposed to deal with a public urinater for seven weeks?

As we walked, we talked about the trip. I voiced my thoughts and he argued with them. By the time we’d made it the two miles around, Everett had pretty much established that he was going to just drink his way through the trip because that was the only way he could get through it. As we climbed into my car, he kept saying over and over again that he was just going to think of it as a party. He actually kept muttering this under his breath as if he was saying it to himself as a mantra to comfort himself. I thought he was going to need a paper bag to breath into just to calm him down.

I think we’ll do fine though. My friend Laura will be with us and chances are, Everett won’t murder me in front of another person. In fact, he’s already emailed Laura, who has never met him, to tell her that it’s good she’s coming because otherwise “I would literally kill my sister.” So I’m kind of banking on that. That, and the hope that public urination isn’t illegal in some countries.