To my older brother *possible triggers*

[cflage]

What a strange relationship we have. I don't wish ill on you, but I also know that because of the dynamics we developed, we will never be close.

I don't think you ever wanted it to be that way originally. Looking back to when we were little kids, you seemed intensely interested in mentoring and guiding me, and in helping me avoid trouble. That's how it started anyway. But if we're being honest, it went far beyond that, and farther than it ever should have gone. It became akin to psychological torture.

Regularly you would invent games to roleplay fictional scenarios that contained serious ethical dilemmas that even grown adults would have difficulty with. I was only a toddler when this started. First I let you pretend that I was a famous sports player, and it was nice. I got to be special. You actually let me play these games as a grown-up version of myself, not as some other person. In these games, you gave me a fictional wife. Children. You made me a recording artist. You gave me fancy possessions and friends. But then you would get bored with that and invent a nemesis for me who would take everything away from me and force me to lose it all. They would steal my belongings, frame me and put me in jail, kidnap my family, and more.

There was nothing I could do to escape the games when they became too intense. I would cry and try to quit playing. You would coax me back in by pretending I had a way to fix everything in the eleventh hour, which sometimes was true and sometimes was not. So I would be under the illusion that it was up to me to make it better, and quite often that had no bearing. It was just however you felt that day whether I was going to have to roleplay an adult whose life was being actively destroyed. This is in no way fun. This is just torment. You were physically bigger and stronger than me, so I felt I had to let it play out. These games persisted for months. More than once I told a parent that I didn't want to play these games ever again. and yet you persisted.

Let me repeat. I was a child. What were you thinking?

I am spelling this out here because I am 100% certain you would deny this ever happened if I truly confronted you, proof that you and I know this was poisonous and wrong. That was abuse.

I regret trusting you. I let you write my life story for me in real time, I let you cast the fictional world around us that I would willingly react to. That was the level of trust I had. I'm not sure what made you think it was okay to do this to me. I don't think you know what you were setting me up for later in life, giving me unfixable problems and letting me suffer in them until you would let me out.

When real problems would come at me later, like bullies or abusive relationships, how was I going to respond? Well, exactly how you had rehearsed for me. I was going to treat them like gods who could freely decide my fate until their whims dictated differently. But by the time this would be an issue for me, you had already abandoned our relationship and showed almost no interest in my problems. Maybe you ran away out of guilt, or maybe you and the bullies are cut from the same cloth because you refuse to take responsibility.

You cannot make this right for us now. You'll have to make your own peace with what you did. I'll find my peace without you.