Co-Creators of the Universe

by Sarah Herrington

Before, I was the only child in my family’s solar system. Grandmas in grocery stores pulled over my mother’s shopping cart to admire my curls, the color of a penny, and to ask who was next. He was. 

He arrived when I was three; he made me a sister. A roly-poly ten-pound newborn with a shock of blond hair; in the photo albums dedicated to our beginning, curated by our mother, I held him tight in every shot. And in every shot we were smiling. We were the only two kids for miles, raised on our family’s farm. Each day of childhood backlit by cornstalk green. Each day he was peaceful, quiet, almost too still. There’s a story: At night mom would sneak into his bedroom and place a mirror under his nose to make sure he was still breathing. In polaroids after his arrival my eyes are changed. Discovering joy, I’d also discovered protection. 

This is my house, Sarah. Ok? Ok, Sarah, Sarah, this is my house, he said. He was three now, I was six. His voice had arrived with a lisp and volume. There was so much I didn’t know. How his birth was difficult, breech, with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. How you could share a home but not a world. In a few years my parents would take him from doctor to doctor trying to help his swinging moods, the lack of connections he was making between words and things. They tried to get help: no clear diagnosis given. 

Outside, our mother, an art teacher, gave us sidewalk chalk to create our own visions on the driveway. We created a universe. He drew a yellow house with a chimney placed over a moon. I drew a pink planet, reachable to him with a single line. No matter how different, I imagined we’d always live this way, connected by a thin, unbreakable thread. 

At eighteen, I wanted space. Our house was filled with the deep static of my brother’s moods, and I wanted to see who I was outside of all that.

Manhattan felt calm because the chaos was expected, external, even famous, and I could keep my dorm room as serene and neat as the Apple Store. At night the skyscrapers looked like stacked stars; I was living in my own constellation.

Moving away, I thought I’d cut our tie. But as I grew forward I began to look back. I wrote my mother a letter. I was worried about my brother. What would happen as we all got older? 

Mom never wrote back. I was hurt. Instead, the next time I was home she handed me a red notebook. I opened it on the Greyhound back to the city. 

He’s angry, she wrote in an entry she penned, when I was twelve and he was eight. Hurts himself. In her diaries, Mom noted small shifts, like clocking the movement of light in a painting. His barreling joy turned to meanness, a flash. He ran off in grocery stores, yelled about wanting to kill himself. I’ll do it, he yelled, putting dad’s tie around his small neck, threatening to exit life the way he entered, gasping.

I didn’t remember any of this. Only that our axis had felt wobbly. I’d spun off. 

Mom’s handwriting began to shift, from measured and neat to dashed. 

Going to new doctors, she wrote, listing them with their phone numbers. Later, crossing them out. 

I looked out the bus window watching trees flash by, bright and deep greens. It was like reading a mystery backward. My heart thudded. So many of the details I hadn’t seen but had somehow felt—all those new angles of gravity. Wasn’t this just how boys were? I once thought. Didn’t everyone love-hate their brother? 

Now I wondered how dark the air around us had really gotten. I read and reread her behind-curtain notes, trying to remember my experiences. So much felt blocked out. 

But I did remember: In elementary school I brought home straight A’s and hid them. I didn’t want him to feel bad. I remembered knowing he was trying his best, but his best was playground fights, speech therapy, special ed. I remembered how he raged. When he was eight, he blasted Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction and Metallica’s Ride the Lightning on loop, banging his head. I cleaned up after him, all those plates of white bread and ketchup. I ran the vacuum, tried to teach him to brush his teeth. Filling my bedroom with aloe plants and healing crystals, I told middle school friends we’re so different! Some people didn’t know I had a brother at all. 

Other memories flashed. 

Once, our parents took his bedroom door off its hinges so they could keep an eye on him and he’d stop slamming. 

Once, he punched a hole in a window. I felt exposed, afraid. 

The night bled black. 

I was twenty-five when a therapist asked if I was ever afraid of my brother.

“Physically? No,” I said, wondering if that was true. In our adulthood he’d grown to twice my size, large as a football player. Now covered in tattoos, even his skin was loud. 

He’d since taken over my old bedroom. When I came to visit, he was often annoyed I was there, changing the routine, taking back real estate. His day was structured down to the hour, and at twenty-something he still commanded the energy in every room. I’d long ago learned to shrink in response, something I was now in therapy for. Learn to take up space in your life, shouted the memes.

I worked in an office and came home to a tiny East Village studio each night. I lived alone and never dated men with loud voices. But had my brother been directly threatening? I didn’t exactly think of my brother as having impulse control. But I’d also never known him to hurt anyone, only himself.

“What about verbally?” the therapist asked. 

I told her the only person who had ever called me a cunt in my life was my brother. That occasionally I was on the receiving end of a flurry of texts in all caps, and when I called my mother I heard him in the background, Life sucks and then you die. One time when a boyfriend yelled at me I’d tumbled into a full panic attack, curled on the bathroom floor in tears, rocking. I’d been having more panic attacks, another reason I was in therapy. I wondered if something was wrong with me, which is another way of saying, I sometimes worried I was becoming my brother.

I was twenty-six when he came to visit me in New York. I told Mom I could handle it, and invited him to take the Greyhound to Port Authority. I wanted to pick up the thread between us. I picked him up and pulled him through crowds of vendors trying to sell him fake Rolexes and Gucci bags. He wanted to talk to everyone, empty his wallet.

We went to Grand Central. The “celestial ceiling” above us dotted with its mural of gold-leafed constellations. At some point in its making, the order of the constellations was reversed, with east and west flipped. It had long since been corrected, except for Orion, who still faced the opposite direction.

I’d booked an appointment in StoryCorps’ bright orange booth, in the southeast corner of the station. The nonprofit recorded conversations of family and loved ones for posterity, and I wanted to ask him everything I never had. I didn’t know another way. There, a third person would be in the booth with us and I thought he’d be polite and not bolt. But as I began to ask him questions from a laminated sheet, he squirmed and I noticed the girl in the corner, the host, looking at us strangely. 

What do you love most about yourself? 

I don’t give up. 

What do you like least?  

Well . . . I get angry . . . 

How do you two know each other? the host asked. 

That night my boyfriend decided to show me how it was done: to bond. He was convinced our family was doing it all wrong, which should have been a sign he’d soon be an ex. He took my brother out, to walk around Brooklyn, get a slice, walk into a bar—“normal guy things.” At some point in the night he sent me a photo of my brother sitting on a sidewalk, slumped along a lightpost, head bowed to heart.

He won’t move, my boyfriend texted, freaking out. He’s acting like a kid. I flinched—he wasn’t a kid, he was a man, complex, layered, with reactions that sometimes still flipped, and this wasn’t something a walk around the city would change. Maybe it never would. I saw my boyfriend didn’t have the caring, protective instinct over him that I had, as much as I longed at times to separate myself from it.  

A wild flurry of safeguarding arose in me. I followed the feeling to bring my brother home. 

Five years later, in West Hollywood, I went to a therapy group for “sibs”—or “siblings of people with disabilities and differences.” I hadn’t even known that was a term or that there were support groups like this. There were many. 

In intros another sister explained: “My brother’s narrative dominated every conversation.” She was baffled by my quiet family of origin, and how that “must have felt against my loud brother.” I tried to explain the weight of space, how it could dominate even a family crowded with problems. Like atmosphere—invisible, mysterious, hard to see when you’re in it. How it holds everything we know, and don’t. 

Everyone in the group was from somewhere else, and everyone carried guilt that they’d moved away. “Survivor’s guilt,” said the therapist, though I shuddered at the term. She said the literature was behind the times, just catching up on the “issues” of “sibs.” “Did you know Freud only mentioned siblings a few times in all his work?” she asked. 

Outside the window, palm trees banged their bright heads.

In the pandemic I moved home for five months to teach remotely and avoid Covid. For the first time since I was a teenager, I was on the same plot of land as him for weeks and weeks. Because I’d been in cities, I quarantined in a furnished space above the family garage. From there, I watched the house. 

During the day I sometimes saw him in the window. I’m not sure if he was aware of me, his silhouette facing a DVD player, face lit by the screen’s otherworldly blue. At night, I gazed up at the stars—so bright in the country, my eyes always landing first on Orion. His broad shoulders, that famous belt. The way the points of light didn’t make a story on their own, only once connected. 

I was back in the universe of my childhood. My brother and I, still facing different directions, still linked by invisible threads. 

When I finally entered the house that evening, he looked at me and told me he was tired. I was too. 

I’m going to bed. Will you tuck me in? he asked. 

Sure, I said, feeling awkward. It was something my mother usually did for him. She was in the other room. I felt honored he was picking me. But how do you tuck in an adult?

My old room was scrubbed clean of crystals. The flower wallpaper was gone, replaced with fresh white paint. It was his room now. The only part of me left was a series of glow-in-the-dark plastic stars stuck to the ceiling from Spencer’s Gifts. I remembered standing on the bed in middle school trying to get them to make the shape of my astrological sign—an assertion of myself, projected. The ceiling fan I’d never used blew on high. He kept it so cold in here it was almost arctic. 

He crawled into bed and lay with his back turned to me. I put my hand on his shoulder. Felt his breath through my palm. Taking an inhale and exhale, I drew a line, synchronizing our breathing.

I returned to New York City.

Last month, on a trip to Joshua Tree my friend and I set up folding chairs near the open trunk of our rental car while an astronomer from UCLA set up a telescope. The sun fell. Surrounded by huge dinosaur rocks made of magma pushed to earth’s surface I felt I was on another plane. But this was ours, home. 

Welcome to stargazing, the guide said. He traced a laser through air that seemed to reach the cosmos. And this was Venus, and this was Orion, a good constellation to use as an anchor in our journey together, he said. Though someday the earth’s axis would tilt so it was no longer visible from this latitude. 

It had been decades since my brother and I first drew our own universe.

Those days, I didn’t talk to him often. I needed a buffer to feel the boundaries of my own self. But the love I felt for him was a massive net, deep and mysterious, no matter how far we moved from each other.

Look, said the guide.

The telescope’s eye took mine. White light blurred at the edges then refocused with a turn of my wrist. What had looked like one dot was actually two, linked by a gravity they co-created. A binary star.

Do you remember? Our invented childhood game: In the yard we extended our arms and twirled. Spinning, the whole point was to go wild, feel the rush of cosmic chaos. What kids we were, welcoming it. 

Then, we fell. Laughing, lying on our backs, we watched the world move. 

We were so steady then, it was a joy to be dizzy. 

Published November 5th, 2023