My Best Friend

It was my first day in college and my brother helped me go through all the hustles of enrollment. At that time, I was not ready for college work, I did not work hard to get adequate training in high school, so my brother came very handy. He was three years older and was currently an upper classman in college, his experience helped me through the difficult process of selecting the course to specialize. My first day in college was also the start of my lifelong friendship with my brother and we became best friends ever since.

I have a lot of stories about my brother, but the first thing I remember was his giving me a bath when I was not yet capable doing it myself. As I grew a lot older, I became a nuisance for following him wherever he went. Our three year age gap was very significant when we were young, he was advanced mentally and physically, but I tried my best to catch up with his abilities. The pre-adolescent years in the life of a boy is always full of fun and mischief so when my brother was at that age, having me tagged along was not cool and was a hindrance especially when he went on mischievous adventures with his friends. But sneaky as I was, I always found my way to wherever my brother and his friends went for adventure and he had to worry about me when we have to get away because of our mischief.

My brother wanted me to join my younger friends but I always found fun with older kids than with my age group. There were times when my brother would escape from me, especially when he and his friends would go to Dagupan to watch movies. One Saturday morning, I noticed that my brother was preparing to go to the movies when I heard him asked permission from my mother. He insconspicuously left our house but I followed him from a distance after I told my mother I was going to the movies with my brother. My brother, being aware that I was following him, tried to confuse me by stopping at different places until he thought that he lost me. He eventually ended up at the town center where he caught the jeepney bound for Dagupan. I took the next trip and followed him to the Dagupan Theater Cinema to watch the movie “ Batman and Robin”, the movie that my brother told my mother. As I was groping my way in the dark theater looking for a seat, my brother saw me and he was left with no alternative but to enjoy my company. After the movie, we ended up eating noodles in the nearby Chinese panciteria.

During his high school years, I could no longer tag along and I was out of his life because his lifestyle and demeanor changed when he started liking girls. He had become a good dresser, always neat with nice clothes and he would never go out of the house without grooming himself in front of a big mirror. I remember him using an aftershave lotion and then pinching his cheeks to have a pink blush, applying a little bit of Johnson baby powder to remove the shine on his face, and then finishing his grooming in front of the big mirror to practice his flashing, contoured smile. With his shoes always polished, his pants and shirt always neatly pressed, he would hang around the town plaza with his two best friends to watch for the girls who were the focus of his infatuations. He had a good voice and had a musical talent so he was sometimes given a solo to perform songs during the school musical drama. During his junior year, he was very much infatuated with a girl classmate, but all he could do was write love letters or passed by her house to catch a glimpse of her.

I was in High School when he left for college at age fifteen at the U.P. Diliman, and I was very proud of him for attending that school. During school breaks, he would be active hanging out with the other college students, having parties and dances which I would watch with envy and wishing that I would be old enough to join. After my high school graduation, I intended to study at the local colleges but my father persuaded me to join my brother in the same school. Because we were both in college, the age gap between me and my brother vanished completely and we became the best of friends. At first we became roommates in a boarding house and eventually we stayed in my aunt’s house for the rest of our college years. He graduated with a DVM degree and had a job as a provincial veterinarian for several years before he left for America. I also graduated from college and had worked for three years in a pharmaceutical company before I immigrated to America.

I was lucky to have him ahead of me here in America and I stayed with him until I landed a job. I always visited him during holidays and we were always in communication, without missing any bit of the happenings in our lives. Every year, we spent time together like best friends do, and we never run out of topics to talk about, our parents, our common friends, and our children. He never missed the important events in my son‘s life, like his baptism, his high school and college graduations. All of our times in America, there was never a week that we missed to call each other, to check or just to hear our voices.

Recently, my brother got sick, very sick and I feel that he is still too young to get that sick. These times, we talk everyday, as if we were trying to cover all the things that we have yet touched. I visit him more often, spending more time and enjoying each other in a very simple way, just the mere presence provides us with the elixir of life. I’ll be missing my best friend, I am already missing him in my mind and I hope I would still have my best friend for sometime, for quite sometime. As we grow older, youth is the new song, but old songs carry the memories of the good, old times which are engraved in our mind. I am contented that the memories I have about my brother linger in my brain, and these memories would forever be stored in the safest corner of my mind. I love my best friend and I would not say goodbye, because I know that someday, I hope to see him somewhere in the Milky way.