Today is simply a day that makes it pretty much impossible not to look back and think about my brother. Due to family circumstances, he was the only sibling that I spent the most time with, so naturally I grew the closest to. When we were still kids, we naturally fought a lot, would do things to get the other person in trouble. Well, he was sort of a master of that. I mean, just look at him. He had a face of a little angel. Me, not so much. 🙂 I can’t count the times he wouldn’t stop bugging me until I would snap and smack him and then he would run crying to mom or his dad to tell on me what I’ve done to him. Then as I would be getting punished, I’d just see that little bugger giving me a smirk as a sign of his “victory”. Gosh, I miss that little smirk!

Eventually, he outgrew me but we also both matured and got past all the silly and meaningless fights. We’ve spent a lot of times bonding whether it was while doing chores, cooking ourselves dinner or just talking while listening to each others problems or life turmoils a teenager can go through. We’ve talked about our fears, our passions, crushes, heartaches, you get the idea. Him being an exceptionally smart kid, I found myself going to him more than once to help me with my math homework. I might have been 4 years older but after he finished 4th grade, he was admitted to high school that was teaching college level classes, so he was pretty much being taught the same material as me. To this day, I can’t stop smiling about the day when he was doing his entry exams into a bilingual high school, which was an annex to mine. I was in my senior year and he finished early with his exams, so I asked my math teacher if he could sit in our class. Our teacher was covering new material and all of a sudden my brother whispers to me that our teacher made a mistake, so I told him to point it out to her, and he did. She was super cool about it and in fact told us that as seniors we should be ashamed that we didn’t notice her mistake. Few minutes went by and my brother points out to me again that she made another mistake but this time he didn’t want to say anything about it, so I raised my hand to say something. I don’t know why but somehow my teacher asked me whether it was really me or my brother who noticed the error. We all chuckled cause it was obvious. 🙂

The interesting and somewhat shocking thing after all this was that once we got results from my brother’s entry exams to the bilingual college, he supposedly failed in math. He couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it, I mean, no one could believe it. He was convinced that something went wrong because he found the math problems to be super easy. So my mom scheduled an appointment for him and her with the dean, so they could get some answers on what happened. What happened? Well, my super smart little brother found all the problems so easy that he just wrote answers without showing his progress on how he came to them. Without showing progress, he was losing a lot of points, even though all his answers were correct. Silly, I know but that’s how it works. The dean questioned my brother about how he came to all those conclusions and then quickly realized that his brain just worked slightly different than in most kids at his age. It didn’t take too long for her to admit that it wouldn’t be a wise decision to not admit someone like him into their school, so he got in.

I could go on and on about him. He was a great guy, an amazing son, grandson and the best brother one could ever ask for. I only wish he was still around, so he could have touch many more of lives in the way he did mine and many others who have known him.

If you are interested, you can read more about my relationship with him and what it meant to me in a paper “More than just a postcard” I wrote back in 2011 for my English Writing class.