On my baby brother

My brother is 18.

He's asleep on the couch across from me. We just finished watching Cars 2. He's found "cracked.com" and thinks it's the funnest site ever, and wants to continually read me articles from there.

I am a freshman in college, I return in January for my second semester. When my friends ask me if I'm homesick, or how I feel about my family, I tell them fervently
"I love my family, and heaven help anyone who hurts them. But it's much easier to love them from two hours away."

They always laugh. I'm not joking.

From two hours away, the rose-tinted glasses slide on. My brother is my brother. He's my blood relative, my only sibling. He's the kid who, when my parents came up to school to bring me some things I forgot, gave me his two-liter of root beer when he saw me looking at it. He's the kid who always wants to give me a hug and a kiss. And I love him. Even with the stupid scraggle-beard he's trying to grow (he's going for the full Abe Lincoln chinstrap look). He means well.

I came home for a three-week Christmas break. It started five days ago.

From up close, the rose-tinted glasses vanish. My brother has Asperger's Syndrome. We didn't get him diagnosed with it until he was 13. I explain Asperger's to people by saying "Ok, here's the thing. Physically, my brother is 18. Mentally, he's brilliant. Emotionally, he's about 7."
It's all true.
Physically, my brother is about three, maybe four inches taller than me, and about forty pounds heavier. He's got stretchmarks on his legs and stomach where he grew up quickly and ended up with a definite gut. He's a grown male, with all that entails.
Mentally, my brother scores around 180 on an IQ test. He could probably get into Mensa. When I was in sixth grade, I won a county spelling bee and went to the state level. When I was in seventh grade, my brother went to that same county bee with me. I took first and he took second. When I was in eighth grade, my final year of eligibility, and he was in sixth, we were two of the final three on stage. I leaned up to the girl in front of me and said that she was going to get second or third...that it wasn't boasting, just truth. I didn't know who would win, but it would be me or my brother. He ended up taking third that year. He has been in a Gifted and Talented program for as long as I can remember. They tested him and allowed him in when he was in kindergarten. If this sounds like I'm proud, that's cause I am. He is an amazing kid.
Emotionally, he's still a kid. He gets out of the tub and walks through the house nude to get a towel. He sticks his hands down his underwear to scratch himself while he's standing in front of my mom and I. If you're reading a book or playing on the computer while he's around, that doesn't mean that you're doing that one thing right then. It's a personal insult to him. You think that book or computer game is more important than him, and that won't do. He can see hypocrisy in everyone but himself. He gives me a hug and I can barely breathe because he squashes my ribcage. That adorable "squeeze-you-SOOOOOOO-tight-cause-I-love-you-SOOOOOOOOOO-much" thing that little kids do? Less adorable when the kid is 18 and weighs about 170. He cannot take someone else's point of view. Seriously, a hypothetical situation means nothing to him. If you've ever taken Psychology and sat through the stages of development, how some stuff develops at a certain time, then you understand this. I have to keep reminding myself of it.

My brother frightens me.
Not in a physical way, not at the moment. I'm afraid of what he might become.
I don't think he'll ever be the shooter. My brother is a child.

It's the things I see him do everyday that scare me.

He comes over and wants a hug. I don't. He has a full meltdown over me not letting him hug me (remember, his hugs are like being trapped in a vise. And he doesn't have an idea of the proper length of a hug). He actually screams for close to an hour, sometimes more, because I didn't want him touching my body.
I see a boy who doesn't understand that everyone is entitled to their own body, that he doesn't have the right to violate that space whenever he wants.

He screams at my cat because she's scratching a cardboard box that's waiting for trash day. I explain, again, that she's a baby. She doesn't understand a word he's saying and she doesn't care. She doesn't speak human, he doesn't speak feline. It's a piece of trash. There is no point to this. He doesn't care. He's still going ballistic.
I see a boy who might someday have children. He can't leave a kitten alone when she's tearing up a piece of trash. Children who scribble on a wall?

He gets told no. We can't afford that soda, we aren't going on that vacation, life interferes. Cue the nuclear meltdown.
I see a boy who can't function in society.

It scares me.

But then, I'm probably blowing smoke here. Both of my parents (mostly my father, but my mother as well, to some extent) show signs of Asperger's, and  my mother has suspected it in me for a while. For that matter, I'll admit that I may very well have the same thing. The only reason that I'm twenty, not seven, is that I was the older kid, and I knew from an early age that my parents couldn't handle two kids like my brother. So I basically gave myself the therapy that my brother never got, simply by faking normalcy...or at least, close enough.

This blog

This is simply a blog for things that I need to get out of my head. Things I need to scream about, or cry about, or what-have-you. Just things that if I leave them in my head, they'll hurt.