DeAndre Badresingh, Memoir 2 Revised
Growing up, I always subconsciously wanted a younger or older brother to either build up or help me along my journey through life. Days would go by and I would see my fellow classmates get picked up at the end of the day by their older sibling while I had to walk home for 20 long minutes by myself. When I would arrive home, I would usually get started on my homework and then proceed to watch TV when everyone else would be getting ready to go to bed. As I gotten older and proceeded to middle school, that feeling that I had slowly faded away. I had the joy of being around my friends to help me forget those feelings. During our senior trip, we went to Disney World, Hershey Park, and even traveled to different states such as Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, And Virginia. Fast forwarding to high school, since I managed to skip 9th grade, everyone in all my classes were older than me. So, they looked at me as the younger kid who was also like the baby of the class. Throughout high school, I always had my friends looking out for me. But everything took a drastic change when I got my first official job working with kids in an After-school.
On a bright September afternoon in 2019, I had a new participant who joined my 3rd grade class. His name was Nicolas and we had an instant connection. There were days he would come to me and express concern that he needed help understanding his homework. Other days, he would just want to talk about how his day was going. Later on, during the year, our bond grew exponentially to the point where we started calling each other ābrothersā. Ever since then, the suppressed feelings from back when I was in elementary school came back. There were times I felt a feeling of emptiness/void, and knowing that Nicolas was not really my little brother, that was even more painful. Days went by when I would get emotional just by Nicolas being there. It was so severe to the point my coworkers were getting deeply concerned for me and wanted to know how they could help. However, even though these feelings were persistent, I did not want to express those feelings when I was around him because he looked up to me and I had to make sure I was as solid as possible. As the year went by, Nicolasā mother wanted me to be with him more to tutor him, play football with him on the weekends, and just overall spend more time with him.
To this day, we still do all those activities and I still call him my little brother because I want to be there for him and spend as much time with him as possible. My goal is to be in his life for as long as possible to give him life lessons such as āNot everyone is your friendā and āNothing last foreverā. In a way, looking back, no one has ever been like a little/older brother to me so now I finally have the chance to be that figure towards Nicolas. In life, I learned that the strongest bonds arenāt necessarily based on how long you known a person but by how much the person means to you.
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