Growing Up With Your Long Lost Brother

I grew up with my long lost brother, but that fact does not make the label any less true. I don't know much about him. There are people I worked with at short retail jobs in my teens who I got to know better than I ever knew my little brother. There was not a drifting apart and there was not any kind of animosity that kept us apart from the start. I care for my brother and love my brother like anyone would.

But I do not know my brother.

If you think it is disingenuous of me to call him a "long lost brother" when we grew up together and I remember him smiling from his crib, please understand. If a man reached my age of thirty and only then learned they had a brother they had never met, never spoken with, never heard of before they would know that brother better than I know mine. They would know at least that he, too, had a long lost brother.

It is not accurate to say that I miss my brother, because you cannot really miss those who you don't know. I missed by brother, the way you miss a fly ball.

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