Lincoln
The First Loop
Watching you wake up on your seventeenth birthday fully believing that it was your sixteenth was an incredibly unpleasant
experience.
The night before, you and I had gotten in a fight, and, as happened sometimes, I was so annoyed and pissed off that I was
fully prepared to ignore/avoid you as much as possible that morning, birthday be damned.
So imagine my surprise when you acted as if that fight had never happened.
I thought you were gaslighting me, which only made me angrier.
But you had no idea what I was talking about and, it soon became clear, you thought Mom, Dad, and I were playing some weird
prank where we were pretending it was your seventeenth birthday instead of your sixteenth.
You’ve always been desperate for us to be the kind of family who revels in pranking each other. But, alas, we are not. Dad
tries sometimes, but mostly it’s just you.
So it was kind of funny for a minute when you thought this was us finally pranking you. Then it got weird. Dad was confused,
and Mom started getting angry, and she told you to stop joking around, and you said you would stop when we stopped.
And then Mom said she didn’t like your attitude, that you were probably tired from being out the night before, which confused you and pissed you off because you said you weren’t out the night before.
That’s when I realized you looked a little different. Like, younger somehow.
And eventually it became clear: You truly thought you were turning sixteen. And you didn’t remember anything from the night
before, or any of the nights from the past year. Mom started crying, and Dad did too. I didn’t. I just felt, like, shocked.
It was a big, hot, scary mess.
And so was the rest of that year.
You saw so many doctors, got CAT scans, MRIs, psych evals, blood tests, along with tests that assessed hormone levels and
adrenal levels and pituitary levels and all sorts of other levels I never even knew existed.
No one could figure out what the hell was going on.
I, meanwhile, was still fourteen, enduring the squall of eighth grade as I tried to figure myself out, which was made simultaneously
easier and harder by the fact that you were taking up every bit of our parents’ attention.
Also hard was that you were incredibly stressed out. I understood this, and I felt bad for you, but I hated that your main
way of coping with that stress was to play pranks on me, or make a joke at my expense, or, I don’t know, some variation on
that. You were particularly obsessed with hiding my shoelaces and then pretending to be shocked that my sneakers didn’t have
any. I did not enjoy it.
By the time December rolled back around, I was in high school with you, and our family had more or less adapted to the situation,
and we were all relieved that we could bid this horrible year adieu and move on.
Only then you woke up on your birthday, and you were sixteen. Again.
Nightmare.
But what was there to do but keep moving forward? Keep looking for a solution.
Keep trying to be the best younger brother to you that I could be.
Again. And again. And again.
And again.