My Brother 丨✔

Chapter 1 - Sticky as glue, identical as Copy and Paste

Having a big brother to care for you was the best thing that could ever happen in life.

Right? Well, besides a significant other, then yes.

We were sticky as glue and identical as Copy and Paste.

Everyone in the family said we were like twins sticking together - even the neighbours thought we were twins! We both loved cycling on our little tricycles, watching 'Mickey Mouse Clubhouse' and dancing along to the hot dog song, spending time in the garden (I chased after butterflies and plucked pretty flowers while he searched for bugs to dissect with his craft scissors) and of course, reading stories... especially during bedtime. The cute thing about this is we would take turns to read each other bedtime stories - and he would always complain I read too slow. Well, him being 2 years older than me had obviously developed a better speech than me, a toddler.

We loved each other so, so much, our parents' friend's started making rumours that we could have been lovers in our past life and reincarnated into siblings with the love still in our hearts.

We even had the same occupation - we both wanted to be doctors when we grow up. We both wanted to help people. We loved helping people. No matter if it was an act of kindness or just a favour that someone asked for, we still love helping. Our uncle was a doctor in a private hospital, so we would blast him with a question-loaded canon every time we see him during family events. The more he told us, the more we wanted to grow up faster to become doctors. Our uncle was a very good doctor and both of us could tell by seeing his medical books everywhere in his study room when we visit him. His walls were full of certificates from medical universities and hospitals. When our uncle was in the hall we would sneak into the room, take the books and try to read them.

"Ko ko," I would call him. (That was what I called him but the actual pronunciation in Cantonese for brother sounded more like 'goh goh'.) "What is this?"

"I dunno," he would say as he looked at the picture I was pointing to. "I think it's a lump of Play-doh!"

"Ko, don't be stupid; we don't have play-doh in our bodies. Mummy says it's poisonous and if we had that in our body we would be in the hospital right now." that was what I told him after every reply he gave when I asked him what was that lumpy thingy in a shape of a body in a picture (which were actually organs in the body, hehe)

"Or maybe they swallowed play-doh and it got stuck in the body." he would suggest.

"Ko, don't be stupid!"

"Well, if the person didn't die then he wouldn't be put inside this book so maybe he ate play-doh and died and-"

"MUMMY, KO KO IS STUPID!!!!" I would shout, cutting him off. Our mom was probably in the hall chatting with our dad and uncle, so I was hoping she heard me.

But instead of our mom coming to see what happen, our uncle would come instead and laugh at us reading his books, often calling us 'cute'. He would just shoo us out from his room and he would sometimes take us out for ice-cream and for a tour in his hospital. We loved the smell of the hospital, strangely. How it smelled medicine-ish and kind of sick-ish (because most of the people there were sick, duh)

Sometimes we would catch our uncle studying in his study room in the middle of the night when we had a sleepover at his house. He left his door slightly open, so whenever my brother and I couldn't sleep, we would just peek inside his room. He would be reading a book and highlighting and writing notes on a piece of paper along the way beside a stack of thick medical books on his desk.He looked really stressed out, so we both decided not to interrupt him with more questions about the play-doh in the human body.

Sometimes when I see something cool doctors do in the hospital like measuring the pulse and heartbeat of a patient (hey, I was a kid - don't judge me), I would pull the sleeve of my brother's shirt gently and say "Ko ko, imagine us doing that when we grow up, we would be so cool!"

Then he would say: "I want to be a doctor but I don't want to study so much." while he pushed my fingers pulling his sleeve away. "Look at how Uncle Samuel studies for his doctor exams in the middle of the night. I don't want to study till I don't have time to sleep... I only want to help people!"

I didn't really mind studying because when I was young, I thought the term 'studying' meant reading. I love reading. That was one of the only things my brother and I disagreed on: studying to be a doctor. I would tell him: "Then, ko ko, go become a nurse and you will only have to help babies change their diapers!"

He would then turn into the Tickle Monster and I would run away from him. He would chase me saying, "I will stuff their poo poo in your mouth!"

Despite the cute little fights we had (yes, which includes pillow fights, too), he was actually very protective towards me. There was this one time a big kid (who I then found out was a jerk) bumped into me and I fell, but he didn't say sorry. Seeing the blood on my left knee due to the fall, my brother got mad and told him to apologize. When he didn't want to, they started arguing and he pushed my brother to the ground before he left. My brother tried to support himself from the fall with his hand and ended up getting a wound on his right palm. We went home telling our parents that we just fell while chasing each other because we didn't want them to start an issue with the jerk's parents who lives 6 houses down the street. It was a secret my brother and I kept for all these years without telling anyone. Those wounds left a scar for us, but we didn't mind it and we named it as our brother and sister mark. We also had the same birthmark behind our left ears at the exact same place, which everyone in the family found magically amusing.

We were the best of brothers and sisters. We loved each other.

Until one day, a heartbreaking shipwreck tore us apart.

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