Sometimes the bond of siblings is so powerful a force that nothing else in the world seems capable of smashing it. More often, this happens when people are young, when they are kids: when the bonds are formed or not formed, as it goes. Spectacular boredom across slow summer days has taken many siblings close in age and kind of locked them into a time warp/ into a sort of frozen block of living in which no one else even seems to exist and no one else could matter.
This is almost spiritual, I would say, when it occurs. But of course that’s the bittersweet rub when it comes to childhood. Kids don’t understand what’s happening in the grand scheme of things. They don’t observe themselves or play at mindfulness or whatever. Those things come later, when our childlike sense of wonder and the ease in which we once lived our days all begins to slide away. Off she goes, youth and all of her wondrous trappings, into an ether of past so impossible to resurrect that many a good person has gone stark raving mad trying. Not to mention the plastic surgery that makes them all look like something from the Spirit store.
Into each kids life, if they are lucky/ or at least willing to put themselves out there, comes friendships and experiences that will serve to lay the groundwork for everything that comes after. Behaviors we showcased when we were 10 don’t remain in their exact forms, of course. However, if you were to have the opportunity to observe your ten-year-old self this afternoon, I believe you would be astonished at just how many mannerism/ ticks/ idiosyncrasies on display you would recognize as intricate and vital parts of who you are now. Most notably, if given the chance to watch our childhood selves in action for a few hours of social interaction, I think we would literally faint as the personality traits we once displayed as children are instantly recognized as things we do, say, and feel at this very moment/ far off into the future from that snot-nose kid in that vacant lot so long ago.
But nothing, I suspect, would surprise us more than to watch us with our brothers or sisters, all of us young again. Like: back in the day. There, in that light, we would experience something we have surely lost. No matter how close you and your siblings remain now (full disclosure: I’ve had zero contact with my only brother for almost four years now), there is still nothing quite like being small and green and naive and wild in this world with the very person (or people) who was born up out of the exact same impossibly rare swamp that you emerged from on the day that you were born. It is immensely magical, siblinghood. No matter what circumstances you were born in and no matter how well you and your kin seemed to get along, there remains the unshakable truth that being brothers or sisters kicks open the possibility of an intense and meaningful experience like nothing else in this life.