it's your birthday

every year on february 1st my brother turns five years older than me. we get one year closer in age at the end of may, when my birthday is, but as of now, this moment, today, he's got even more of an edge. we've known each other my entire life, i guess that goes without saying, but it's easily taken for granted. nobody else can make me laugh as hard (even if it is at him) and no one else can make me feel like i have the power to set things on fire with my eyes. he's a much nicer person than me and seems to know everything about everything...

i have spent the better part of my life thinking about and trying to understand certain types of relationships and why they are so important. as a child of divorce (a couple times over) natural questions about consistency, reliability, and conditionality emerge. many of those questions don't ever get answered and life inevitably carries on, a little fractured maybe, but still with a persevering cosmic direction.

they say the things you can rely on are death and taxes, and i can't argue either. i sometimes wonder how we are able to do anything at all with the weight of losing surrounding us, always. i'm no fan of the taxman, but i get a thrill when i can do them myself, but that's mostly because i don't have a lot to account for.

but i do. i have so much.

the other day i found myself in a wedding planning rabbit hole. i was sitting in traffic, probably adding costs up in my head, feeling both ashamed for becoming what i swore i never would, and wondering  how wedding planning is, unanimously, a take no prisoners situation. and then all of a sudden, without even realizing it, i was dialing my brother's phone number.

since i've been engaged he's been incredibly supportive. he's happy for me and loves my fiancé. having always wanted to have a brother (and having only me, who aims to please, but doesn't quite cut it) he's embraced my fiancé and our planning for our future in a way i'm not sure i expected.

when he picked up the line, we exchanged a few pleasantries and then before i knew it i was knee-deep in a longwinded planning predicament. i was even boring myself but couldn't seem to back my way out once i got started. i was practically panting. his end of the line was quiet. i was sure he was checking his email or thinking about what he was going to eat for dinner. i kept going. about a year in, i checked to see if he was still there. he was. he was actually listening really intently. he may not have been interested, but he cared.

while no revolutionary decisions were made or solutions met during our conversation, something much better was realized. we've been through a lot together, my brother and i, sometimes we didn't have each other around when we really needed it, and sometimes we were so close that we couldn't see past certain issues. he didn't take an opportunity to remind me of how, in the scheme of things, planning a wedding is not death or taxes, but instead he was patient, kind, loving, and funny where he needed to be. i got off the phone knowing that he's in my corner, that he'd probably try to learn how to bake my wedding cake if i needed him to.

so today especially, since each day is worth celebrating, i am doing it for my brother, jake. i am a writer because all i know is that i find, at times, the world a hard place to seamlessly articulate, so there are certain things i'm just going to have to leave to feeling.

happy birthday, jake. thanks, i love you, you're funny mostly because you're left-handed, and you are a really good person!