Breaking Boundaries

Luisiana Rosales

English 1A

Frankie Lennon

Breaking Boundaries

    “Respect your elders! Respect your elders! Respect your elders!” As a child I was told this one too many times by one person who adored flaunting the fact he exited the womb earlier than I did.  Due to this constant reminder I was forced to always agree or do whatever my older brother Luis said. Whenever I would tell my parents about his insipid ways they would be blinded by his sudden look of innocence. In addition, whenever we were left alone at home, he was unfortunately in charge, which made me always resent him because he would view this responsibility as a power over me. As a result, we never saw eye to eye on anything, creating countless arguments over frivolous things.

Luckily, as Luis progressed into a pre-teen his foul behavior became visible to my parents. Although they reprimanded him for his rude behavior toward me; he would only momentarily cease his tyranny, remembering later to pick up where he left off. This laborious routine annoyed me at first, but as we continued to grow up this became normal to me and overtime I learned to fight back. With time the routine began to be tweaked. It usually started off with a calm conversation proceeded by a disagreement.  This was then followed by a bitter silence plagued of annoyance. Ending with us, forgetting the whole thing ever happened. With time we picked up where we left off. Gradually this lack of resolution became the resolution until one day it became too much for me to bare.

    It was the summer of 2005, and it was another blistering hot day. It was one of those days where no one wanted to go outside to face the dry air; air that by simply inhaling it just once caused one’s throat to become instantaneously dry, making one direly crave anything to drink. Thankfully my parents had invested in an air conditioning system years before, otherwise we would all be sitting in our sweat fanning ourselves excessively as sweat beads would run down our backs like insects crawling rapidly away from a light. On this afternoon my brother, grandmother, and I were all pleasantly sitting in our living room calmly watching TV on three separate couches that faced the television set perfectly. As he usually did, Luis sat across from my couch with his laptop resting on his lap, chatting with who knows who and doing who knows what. I, on the other hand, had the remote control and was looking for something “tolerable” to watch, because by this late in the summer one had already seen everything on TV, ensuing a tediously long search for new entertainment. My grandmother on the other hand kept going in and out of the kitchen as she prepared a cholesterol healthy lunch for my brother. Overall it was just another day, or so I thought.

    As I finally decided on a television show, of which I cannot recall the name of, Luis looked up and found the need to roll his eyes and mumble something. I decided to ignore his obvious bait to criticize me for something else. As I turned my attention to what I had chosen, Luis decided to blast a song that he knew all too well I disliked, because the lyrics and the song itself seemed idiotic to me. However Luis took it upon himself to poison the air with this obtrusive noise, and instead of yelling at him to turn it down I decided to ridicule him by asking him in a disgusted tone, “Why are you listening to that?” He immediately grew furious and shot back, asking why was I even watching TV if I had seen everything on TV. He then added that I should get a life already because my TV watching was getting annoying. I should have done the Christian thing and turned the other cheek, but instead I retorted with, “Look who’s talking; all you ever do is spend time on that computer listening to God-awful music.” He glared at me and subtly responded with, “rude.” I found this extremely hypocritical because he had decided to be inconsiderate of everyone by blasting music that only he enjoyed. Naturally I told him this which resulted in what seemed to be the next David & Goliath feud.
    As usual, Luis started spouting his elitist rhetoric that he was three years older than me and that he knew much more than I did, hence he was always in charge. To this I swiftly corrected him by saying that he was two and a half years older than me and that our grandmother was the one in charge, not him, so he should stop kidding himself with those delusions of grandeur. He looked at me bitterly saying that if this was the way I acted with my teachers that he felt sorry for them because I obviously did not know how to respect my elders. Without a second thought I responded that unlike him I respected them because they earned my respect whereas he was someone whom I would never respect. This rebuttal apparently sparked the fire to his dormant anger because he got up without missing a beat, and I got up ready to stand my ground. However in the time it took me to stand up, Luis had already pounced on me pushing me to the wall. I was distraught and was ready to kick him but instead he pushed me again, yelling out “dog.” Tears began to cloud my vision and I tried desperately to hold them back but I felt powerless. All those years as a kid I had believed myself to be so full of hidden strength, enough so that I could take on the world, the idea now seemed to diminish in the face of danger. I was no longer a lion ready to fight but a zebra ready to run for its’ life, and upon registering my situation I ran from my brother into the kitchen where my grandmother stood advising my brother in Spanish to calm himself and to think of his cholesterol. He shrugged off her concerns and spat out “dog” to me once more. This time my grandmother was here to witness Luis’ rage, and although she only understood simple English words, she understood fully what Luis was calling me and quickly penalized him for calling me as such.

During this moment of deliberation I quickly ran out of the kitchen through the hallway, and into my room, making sure to firmly close the door behind me; locking and barricading it with anything I could find in my room. As I scanned my towering handiwork looking for any flaws that could allow Luis any easy entry, I heard heavy footsteps reverberate in the hallway quickly followed by a slammed door adjacent to my room. Presumably Luis had been admonished for his behavior and later when my mother came home I would have to explain what had been said. However, hours later when my mother came home, my grandmother nor my brother made any reference to what had happened earlier. It was days later when my brother finally did speak to me and when he did, it was as if he was talking to someone he had never met before. Eventually his hostility melted away and he started to pick up on his usual habits forgetting that the whole thing ever happened, leaving yet another fight unresolved.

To this day, I continue to fight with my brother, and like all our other fights they remain unresolved. One key difference between our past fights and now is their frequency. When we were growing up, we lived together under the same household making the likelihood for an argument to start easily. When Luis moved out to attend college in Berkeley, somehow things just seemed to settle down between us. We didn’t find the need to disagree anymore. Eventually I realized that I needed to put aside my differences and notice that I wouldn’t be able to spend time at all with my brother like I used to. Simultaneously Luis came to this realization and we progressively began to disagree less when he visited. Realistically we do argue every now and then but the tendency has dramatically dropped. I believe it was because we both came to this understanding that we came to  appreciate each other more. Overall what really matters in life is having each other through the good and the bad times because in the end age is nothing but a number.