Fife hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes, times two.

I know I keep posting about this, but this feeling that I might pee my pants if I don't talk about it incessantly is mildy uncomfortable. I will try to disguise it with other rantings, too, maybe.

Brother. 29 hours. I never thought it'd get this close, like he's been away so long that I was planning on him never returning. Like somehow time would just stop, as it seems to have been doing for the past two years. But with the same breath, in this time, my real life began--and I did anything but stop. Real life as a semi-adult, with responsibility, and less parents and that type of thing.

Garrett hasn't seen me graduated from high school, let alone a junior in college. He hasn't seen my running shoes or my blonde streak, my pictures of him all over bulletin board and cell phone background. He vaguely knows only one of my four best friends in the world. He hasn't watched me freak out and roll around giggling about being a music teacher in the inner city, or cry and cry when the opportunity I wanted so badly brushed my fingertips and flitted away at my own request. I didn't know the plan as a high school kid, when we knew each other last.

In these two years I pulled my first all nighter and did my own taxes, chopped off all my hair and got a boyfriend, voted for the first black president in American history and got in my first car accident. ((not in that order)). I somehow accumulated a $250 iPod and a $450 camera, a sufficient library when I'd vowed never to buy books, and a lacking bank account with all the money I've pitched on rent and tuition and heaven knows how many restaurants--but mostly, I just accumulated great youtube videos and a deeper love for everything I already liked a whole lot, like music and people and loving.

Garrett wasn't there for my seemingly countless encounters with the police for my delinquency, or for the funeral of our great-grandma. He didn't hold me through the cycle of six different jobs or five different moves, of four wonderful roommates and one completely, totally crazy one.

So I've ripped a dozen contacts, paid $4.00 and half that for a gallon of gas, been places and back.

It's so off that it's all been without him.

and yet I know, I just know--after 17, 531. 625 hours of not seeing each other, we will pick right up in 29, without skipping a beat. that's probably the best part of the brother package, i feel.

See you tomorrow.

(just as i suspected: that's a whole lot more excellent than "see you in two years.")