When I was a little lad I vividly remember concocting an imaginary friend who was my brother. I referred and responded to him as such. I think I did this out of necessity and loneliness. I was an only child. One of my biggest dreams was to have a sibling. So, because my parents insisted that was impossible (since my mother had her baby box shut down) I made one up.

As an adult I’m glad I was alone. It made me stronger and more independent than my friends who have siblings. I feel like they rely too much on other people for things and that bugs. However I know that’s me being an “only child.”

Before my mother had me, she had a miscarriage. It was shortly after my mother and father had gotten married. It literally happened in the bathroom at the party her work threw for her after the ceremony. My mother said it was god punishing her for having sex outside of marriage. Which, if that were true that sounds like a sociopath and not a benevolent, loving father figure.

Shortly after she got pregnant again (I assume I was conceived on Valentine’s Day) and had me.

When my mother was going through the final months of her Alzheimer’s she started to see a little boy. One day I came to visit and my mother was talking down to a child, with the nurse standing watch over her. I stepped next to the attendant and she turned to me and said in a hushed voice “she’s talking to her son.”

“Well that’s odd,” I said, “I’m the only one she has.”

I said hello to my mother pulling her from this fantasy.

I’m not sure if it was this same day or a few days later my mom turned to me and said with clarity, which was rare because her disease had taken her speech from her and she could only utter garbledegook, that my brother had come to visit.

“Did he? That’s good.”

She then began to tell me that he was the same age as me, but not. He didn’t know very much, because “he hadn’t gone to school.” There was another thing she had said that was like me but different, but for the life of me I can’t remember. (Grief has done a number on my memory.)

These two events didn’t line up in my mind until a few weeks ago, when I remembered my imaginary brother. Since then it has called into question if he was made up. Maybe on some level he has always been with me and I could just feel him there.

This is all nonsense in the big scheme of things. Without concrete proof or examples it’s left up to faith. That is something I don’t have, not anymore. I abandoned spiritual beliefs when I realized that either there isn’t a god and everything is a chaotic meaningless accident, or there is a higher power and he is just incompetent or genuinely enjoys watching people suffer.

With that said, being surrounded by death does make you question even things you had once believed. The world is strange and there is no denying some things just don’t have explanations. Or one’s we can give with certainty.

My husband has been invested in researching the after life and reincarnation. (For obvious reasons.) Somehow my tiktok algorithm picked up on this and would show me videos of parents retelling events where their kids had said or known of details and events that they genuinely could not have otherwise. It was then that I was introduced to the concept of a “soul family” and how there is a belief that we reincarnate with the same collection of souls in different roles. I added my own perspective that we are given knowledge of these lives and offered a choice of what and where we want to go. It is this vein of thought that I wondered if my sibling knew what was going to happen in the future and thought that it’d be best if I took the role instead. This of course only being plausible if any of that spiritual stuff is real.

In the end it’s more likely that I am just trying to make sense of all of the chaos and trying to give it purpose and meaning, because it is what we do as humans. The other day I was ranting to the bf about what is the life lesson, what am I meant to get from these events happening all at once.

His response was ‘there is only a lesson or meaning if there is a god guiding everything.’ To that I cannot believe and to which I refuse. I’m sticking with the my accident/chaos theories.

The only other “fact” I have for this brother being with me is that I never feel alone. Granted I’m never physically alone. I am constantly around someone (much to my chagrin.) Even in these odd moments I am by myself I feel as though there is someone there. I could and do sometimes just turn to them and talk as though they’re listening. Although there is nothing there that would warrant this action. And it is nothing new. I have done this since I was little. It’s all just a feeling.