“I love you Jean!”
“I love you Tamira (Semira)”
Everyday, at least once a day, an exchange of an “I love you” was said between my two year old brother Jean and I. Since I have been here, Jean has become one of my best friends and my brother. Even though he is only two years old, for some reason we can talk to each other for hours.
Jean is not like the rest of the two year olds I have met. He is very curious and is always asking questions. He is always very sociable and fights for his family. I remember this one time my cousin was wrestling my younger brother, Reneé. Right when Jean saw my cousin hurting our older brother, he ran up to my 6ft tall cousin and starting hitting him with all his might. So needless to say, Jean is pretty fearless.
He is also a very smart kid. My goal when I got here was to teach him English, and so far it has been going well. He already knows numbers one through 10 and can recite letters A-G by himself. He even knows the simple introductions in English. Such as, “How are you?” and “What is your name?” So all in all he is a very smart child.
He also has a lot of energy, probably due to all the sugar he eats, but I don’t complain. I have even given him the name “Gordito” which roughly means “fatty” in Spanish. He owns up to it.
The main reason that I am writing this blog post is not to just describe Jean and everything he does. The main reason for me writing this is because I will be leaving him in a matter of weeks, and it will probably be one of the hardest things I will have to do. My mom is even using me leaving against him. Every time Jean starts crying over something my mom keeps on saying, “if you don’t stop crying, Semira is going to leave right now.” Which, yes, I agree is cruel, but it does make him stop crying.
I feel as if he senses that I am leaving too, which is weird because no one has told him anything about me leaving, except for the fact that my mom uses it against him. But, every time that I leave the house to go to my father’s boutique or to a friend’s house, he starts crying and asking where am I going. There was this one incident that happened just this last past week, where I went to the bathroom for literally two minutes and when I got back Jean was crying because I didn’t say bye to him. So for me leaving, saying goodbye to each other will be a mutual thing.
The worst part for me though. As sad as it is, when he gets older, he probably will not remember me. I’m not saying this because I want “pitty” or sympathy from anyone, but because it is the truth. Even when I was two years old, I don’t even remember half the people that I met. It’s just an age thing I guess.
My hope is though, that when my beautiful, intelligent younger brother gets older, he will go to college and learn English. And that he will read this blog post that I have dedicated to him. So that he can find that there was once a 19-year-old girl that lived in his house for a very long time. And that this girl loves him very much.
