I Don't Like This World, I Only Like You

3.1

Chapter 3: The Daily Lives of the Hilariously Retarded Siblings

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I have an older brother named Taehyung who is one year older than me. Although we were born by the same set of parents, we do not resemble each other the slightest bit. Even when we were babies, he was always smarter than me. When I was still playing with wooden blocks, he played with the rheostat and the ammeter. When I was trying to commit the multiplication table to memory, he had already started to recite the Periodic Table. When he was discussing with the teacher whether the creation of a magnetic field by a moving charge violated the laws on conservation of energy, I was standing at the side, incapable of even understanding the symbols that they were talking about.

I frequently suspected that he had two brains – one of which was snatched from me.

When I was young, I often envied daughters who were the only child in the family. Taehyung and I fought from young, and he never ever gave in to me. Last year, my cousin gave birth to her second child, resulting in the mild unhappiness of her elder son. At the baby shower, Taehyung congratulated him with a wide grin on his face, “Congratulations! Now when you make mistakes, you have a ready made scapegoat for you!” It is pertinently obvious from this sentence how depressing my childhood was.

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Taehyung frequently bullied me when I was young; he refused to play with me, and even snatched my snacks. As I was much fatter than him then, I had an overwhelming advantage when it came to physical fights – if I wasn’t able to snatch my snacks back, I would immediately resort to physical force. However, this ass was a terribly good actor. Before I could even raise my fist, the moment he say Mother walking past he would immediately fall onto the ground and grab hold of his head, wailing and crying out in pain. The entire process was as smooth as silk.

The result was: I received a good beating from my mum.

Of course, there were times when I was smart too. My mother taught us how to write, and before I could even learn how to write my own name, I learnt how to write his name. As such, I wrote on ‘The Tomb of Taehyung’ on an ice cream stick, and stuck it into my family’s flower pot.

The result is: I received another beating. There are many, various types of siblings – there is the type who love each other very much, there is the type that are extremely close, there is the type that cannot stand to look at each other. Taehyung and I, on the other hand, belonged to the type that constantly fought ever since we were born.

Taehyung’s bitchy mouth is a natural, in-born talent which he cultivated ever since he was in my mother’s womb. When I was young, I was a true blue fatty. During winter, my mother would worry about both me and Taehyung feeling cold, and thus gave us a huge amount of clothes to wear. However, Taehyung never seemed to appear fat no matter how many layers he wore, whereas I simply transformed into a round and fat ball.