Declan.

Last night at work, I had a bit of a panic attack. Something like that, something similar. You don’t really know while you’re in it, why it happens, but the reasons were there, and I know them now. 

1) There was a boy there I really, really didn’t want to see.

2) I leave for college in eleven days, fifteen hours, and thirteen minutes. 

3) The restaurant was loud, and buzzing, and my head was full of all of it. 

And 4) For the past two, three, seven, thirty (?) days, all I can really think about is my brother. 

He’s pretty unremarkable, as far as brothers go—big. Strong. Smart. Quiet, in class and when you ask about his day. Loud, when a team he likes scores against one he doesn’t on TV. Fun, if he feels like it and I’m lucky.

But he’s mine. Two years, six months, and four days younger than me.

—

I think about a lot of things—his small, rubbery knees from the days we used to shower together. The multi-colored “drug rug” he wore in Singapore. Plastic soccer trophies. Physical fights we had over who got the iPad. Sharing a bowl of popcorn under my mom’s comforter when he finally finished the book and we could watch the first Harry Potter movie.

—

I wonder what he remembers.

His tears when our cats died. Pulling him by the hand across the front yard during hide and seek. Birthdays and Christmases and the first six months after the move, our bodies angry, bright, bitter and burning.

And yeah, I’m the one who’s leaving, moving out, getting away, but every time he pulls out of the driveway in his truck—stick shift, something I can’t drive and another check on a list of things I’m so goddamn proud of him for—I don’t think about myself. I think about that little boy, slinking farther and farther away from me as his shoulders broaden and his voice deepens and the dimples on his chin stop distracting from the hair there.

And it hurts. When I leave, I won’t be there for the small things—he’ll change more quickly, more obviously, instead of infinitesimally in our day to day. He’ll know me even less than he does now, years and years after we played King of the Hill every morning or cards every afternoon.

And he doesn’t know I miss it. Because I haven’t told him.

But I hope. I do. 

—

Maybe the dents in our floor, worn dark and shiny with age, remind him of the days I used to pin him there, crowing about strength and endurance and victory.

Maybe the tape residue on his door makes him think about when I used to put stickers and drawings and cards there, laughing when he moaned about the sticky feeling.

Maybe the trampoline on the east side of our house, right by his window—if he ever goes and tries it when we aren’t looking—still gives and bounces like it used to, when we would spend hours out there, jumping to the creak of the springs and my dad’s old music.

And maybe, maybe, if I’m lucky, like I said, the sweatshirts he’s stolen from my bedroom smell like my hair, like the skin on my wrists, like the sun-soaked pillows in my mom’s bed on a morning in March I didn’t really know there was a baby, a brother, to come back to at all.