Baby Brother

I've always had weird, weird dreams. Like most people, my dreams don't linger with me for long, drifting out of my memory before lunchtime. But the really strange ones stay with me for awhile, sometimes even for years. I can still remember the worst nightmare I had as a child, where this tiny toy soldier came to life and hunted me and my siblings, who hid in a thatched roof to escape him. I can still remember one of my favorite dreams from high school, where the back of my closet opened into my very own private mall where everything was free for me.

Lately I've been dreaming a lot about my little brother.

He's not so little right now, but since he is 2 years younger than me, he's spent his entire life suffering and benefitting from my reign of terror. Sure, he wasn't allowed to choose the game we played, he never got to hold the remote, and any time he dared to disagree with me he was either physically or verbally assaulted. But at the same time, I was protective of my little brother. Generally, that was pretty easy to do since Patrick is a well-liked guy and always has been. Still, let it be known that if you say anything bad about him, I will make you regret it. I worked with a girl who was in his gradauting class who DARED to open her mouth about Patrick. I placed an immediate and irreversible Noratorium on her, and she got a whole new understanding of the cold shoulder.

The other night I dreamed that I was being held hostage in my basement by a man who claimed he had installed a safe in the wall for my father and was now going to rob us all blind. The entire dream revolved around me trying to keep Patrick from coming down to the basement, where my captor claimed he would shoot him if he tried to save me. This is the latest in a series of dreams where I'm trying to keep my brother safe in the most bizarre of situations.

One explanation could be that all dreams and naturally weird and messed up, unless everyone has dreamed that their closet is really a secret portal to a private mall. I think it's just my way of dealing with the stress of Patrick shipping out again for an undisclosed amount of time. It's weird not to be able to call him every day, and not just because he's one of the only people who can appreciate when I see someone walk into a plate glass window. It's weird to think that a kid who had the bedroom next to me for so many years, who kept me awake with his damn snoring even after our parents threw down the money to get his adenoids removed, is now going to be spending his nights in a distant time zone. Like the urge to kick his ass, the urge to protect him doesn't wane with the years. I won't be there to take care of him, but maybe he doesn't need me to anymore. Maybe my little brother is all growed up.

But just in case he isn't, and he is still the potato-headed, doe-eyed, nerdboy from my childhood, I want to say this: I'm going to miss you, Paddy.