Sticks and Stones; or something like that.

My brother loved to test boundaries. He would constantly have the teachers on their toes, and when we got home, he would drive my parents to the edge with his foolery. “Can I do this?” and “Can I touch that?” were his daily refrains. You would think he’d collapse after a day of screeching and shouting, but no—he fought sleep with the same stubborn defiance. It was as if he didn’t believe sleep was real, or worse, that sleep was an enemy waiting to ambush him.

Sometimes, I wondered if it wasn’t just energy that kept him awake, but fear. Fear of what might come to him in the stillness of silence, when the house finally hushed and the shadows began to grow long. He never said it, but I think he was afraid of what he might hear in that quiet—the questions he couldn’t dodge, the truths he couldn’t laugh away.

But my brother was never one to linger in heaviness. He believed in motion, in sound, in chaos. If he could keep the world moving fast enough, maybe nothing painful could ever catch him. And so he wore mischief like armor. He filled the air with noise, leaving no space for silence to creep in.

Looking back, I see it clearly: he wasn’t just testing boundaries to see what he could get away with. He was testing the world itself—its patience, its strength, its love. And somehow, in the middle of all that madness, he taught me something too. That sometimes the loudest people are the ones carrying the heaviest quiet inside.