Non-Fiction – My Eighteenth Birthday
I went to Katie, because she is my little sister, and the best people to show your weakness to are the ones who think you are strong.
She was in her bed, because there isn’t much real-estate in her old bedroom, and it was the largest clear area. Plus, Katie likes to sleep. Especially around midnight. There is a mural of a young Katie riding a unicorn (or Pegasus, I can’t remember which) on one wall, painted by a family friend when she was much younger. Her single incandescent lamp gave the images a warm cast.
“Happy Birthday bubby,” she said. She was fifteen, but “bubby” was still acceptable when it was just the two of us. Still is.
“Thanks sisky,” I said back. You can thank my mother for that strange word.
“You’re eighteen!” she said, grinning.
I was. I had turned legally eighteen at midnight, July 25th, 2004. I was a grown up.
“It’s weird,” I said, shrugging. Not a “move-on” shrug, but a “what the hell” kind of shrug. Parents confuse the two frequently, but there is no one so confused as a teenager.
“You’re an adult now,” Katie noticed.
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
How to explain? Here was this transformative moment, this line in the sand. I had just stepped from childhood into adulthood. Except I was the same person.
“Nothing has changed,” I reflected.
“Well you can vote. And buy cigarettes. And porn I guess.” She made a face. I was her older brother after all.
“Ugh, but I don’t feel any different!”
Adults looked so much more confident. Like every 17 year old, I had just assumed wisdom came flying at you out of the ether and making you a functional person when you became an adult. And a change had happened, though I didn’t realize it for a long time. Suddenly I was very aware, and very scared, of my ignorance.
“It’ll be okay bubby,” she said softly.
I looked at her then, and thought about what she must see. She was an adorable fifteen year old girl, with bright eyes and the same round cheeks as me. I was tall and skinny, a mess of hair on top of my tan frame. I was six foot one and maybe one hundred and fifty pounds and no future, but she looked at me like superman.
I have always struggled with that look, trying to understand it. The love of a younger sibling is like the love of a child for a parent: it’s rarely earned. I had let Katie down in so many ways over the years. I hadn’t stopped the man that had hurt her. I hadn’t held myself together when my mom was sick, my dad was working 12 hour days, and someone needed to be strong. I had let her see me scabbed over from hurting myself. She had heard my ex hitting me in my bedroom not ten feet from hers. She’d listened my parents fighting over what to do with me, because I was going to fail out of high school. Those are just the mistakes I had made up to that point.
“I don’t know Katie,” I said simply, looking at her. “I don’t know anything!”
I sat down on her bed beside her. I was a Junior in high school, but I felt like I was already half dead. Birthdays are a time of memories, and most of mine were of failure. The ones I was thinking of anyway. My inner life was not exactly rich.
“Well what did you think would happen?” She asked, one eyebrow arched.
That was a good question. I had no answers. I never did.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
She pulled me into a hug then. She squeezed me tight, because for all my screw ups, for all the ways I hated myself so desperately, I was her older brother. And she loved me.
“It’s just a birthday,” she said looking out her window.
I rested my head on hers and smiled just a little.
