The suburbs, Sydney.  11.40pm, June 3, 2024.

The night before my brother left for the UK, he slept in the study. The twin bed with the stained wooden frame is too short for any of us to sleep in now. A plastic rosary hangs off the left post, and on the wall behind, there is a sticker my sister put there.

It used to be her room, with a plush pink jellyfish hanging from the ceiling, blue paper lanterns, soccer trophies, and the entire Zoella Beauty collection littered across her desk.

Before that, it was my brother’s room, with a blue, star-shaped, reading light from IKEA, a poster with every Pokémon labelled, a guitar, his own soccer trophies, and the entire set of Deltora Quest books.

He had moved out about three years ago, to a nice apartment with views of the CBD on the horizon, a five-minute drive away from our house. After that, the room was no one’s.

It became the study. The blue star light went to my room, the Pokémon poster and books went to my sister, and the guitar went to a corner in the living room, where everyone fights the urge to strum it when they walk past. What are we if not pieces of our older sibling, broken off and handed to us as they grow?

I remember when my brother was 10, I was 7, and my sister was 4, my mum said to us, I wish I could freeze time and you would stay this age forever. The only thing more exciting than 7 was 8, and I never understood that. How could I predict that as adults, I would cling to those memories: breathing down my brother’s neck as I watch him play Club Penguin, begging to read the books on his shelf, playing “war” and riding bikes, spotting him on the oval at lunchtime in primary school, forcing him to watch me and my sister put on shows. No one prepared me for us to suddenly be 26, 23 and 20.

I actively avoided Scott Street by Phoebe Bridgers the days before he left. The song is purposefully evocative of childhood, with bicycle bells, a steam train horn, and whistling. It is soft, gentle, and coaxing. It makes the repeated lyric of “anyway don’t be a stranger”, a betrayal. A sharp reminder that memories are just memories, and we can never truly revisit them, no matter how many times we replay it in our head. Can a sibling become a stranger through physical distance? What happens when we no longer share the same family computer? The same cricket set? The same bruises on shins from tripping up the same staircase? What is a younger sibling if not a mirror of all your scratches and cuts because they followed you up every tree? What am I if not an offshoot of you? Have we already been the closest we will ever be?

I do not have the foresight to know definitively, only the sureness of my anxiety. I cannot go back, and I cannot see forward. Tomorrow, my brother will be an ocean away. But for now, he is two doors away. For now, I can carve out this space in time, where once more, we are all under the same roof again. For 20 more minutes, we have a shared history, and I am still a mirror of him, and my sister, still a mirror of me.

Stereo Story #814

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Jennifer Manoogian is a 20 something year old amateur writer, actress and waitress (they always go hand in hand) from Sydney. She is known for writing once every eight months, usually at 3am.