The Turtles

They pushed the small round stones to the corner, allowing a vacant space on the reflective mirror below them. They do it all the time. Sometimes, the sound of two stones colliding or one of them hitting the glass was loud enough during night to reach my room. It was an annoying noise, but at the same time, a constant reminder of home. It brought up all the memories about the house and all the people who used to live inside it.

When I was waiting for my mother to serve a breakfast in the dining room last summer, I starred at a very familiar glass box. It had been seven years since my brother and I bought them at the animal shop. A couple of 8 inch Red-eared Slider turtles. They were smaller than 2 inches when we bought them. We wanted them to reproduce, so we bought a pair of male and female turtles—later on we found out that both of them were male. We put them inside a glass box with water filled half full to prevent them from climbing up the box. We added some white stones at the bottom of the box because we thought that the turtles would need something to play with.  Both of them were silent when I was looking at them, only some movements of their rear limbs to keep themselves floating.

The morning sunlight barely penetrated into the green and thick-looking water in the box. I took the turtles out of the water and put them on the floor under the sun. They really liked it and they looked so enthusiastic. It had been a while since they were exposed to direct sunlight. I believed that my parents didn’t change the water for a long time because they were busy with their work. I brought the glass box to the bathroom and poured the water into the sink. When we were home, either my brother or I will replace the water once every four weeks. I cleaned up the interior of the box a bit and filled it with freshwater. It was long enough to give the turtles enough time to enjoy their sun bathing. After my brother went to college and I went to the boarding school, we just came back home a couple times a year. It’s funny that one of a few bonds that I share with my brother is just a couple of turtles which are still alive today. I realized the fact that they have been together for seven years. I wondered how close their relationship became. Two of them, seven years, in a glass box. Sometimes I noticed that they were playing spy. One of them was on top of the other. The top guy pulled his head out of the water, turned around, and scanned the condition like a periscope.

My brother and I have a small number of things in common. My friends say that my brother and I do not look alike. He is gorgeous, has a really good speaking skill, has a lot of friends in every place he has visited, and loves sports. Well, I am the opposite. I am a kind of guy who loves math and sciences, has a horrible public speaking skill, does not have many friends, and loves arts instead of sports. I fought a lot with him when we were kids just for simple reasons, like competing over who had the control of the TV remote. My brother shared many stories with me, the ones that parents do not need to know, but brothers and friends do. On the other hand, I never said too many things to anybody. I always thought that my stories were not worth listening to. I always kept all my problems to myself.

Despite all the fights and the strange feelings of mine, we had fun together. Since I do not have many friends to go out with, my brother sometimes took me to see his place, his friends, and let me to taste a little bit of his life. I remember one day when we went fishing together on a small lake near his school. He showed me how to fish, and I enjoyed it. He introduced me to his friends. They welcomed me. I felt like I also had friends just like he did.

I also learn a lot from his experience. When he was in high school, he always wanted to be a police officer or a soldier. When the admission process was coming up, he prepared for it seriously. He studied really hard, worked out every day to lower his weight, but still kept his body fit. The army admission process was one of the toughest admissions in the nation. Not only must the applicant show a good academic standing, but also a physical endurance and a flawless body. He successfully reached the final round of the admission process. He skipped some Universities’ admission test because they had a conflicted date with the army selection process. At the end of the day, he failed at the very last round and had missed the admission process of the good universities. He started all over again. He had to burry deeply all he had been wanting throughout his life. He went to a second rate local university that still received applicant at that time. He then graduated from college and started a new career as a civil engineer. Not many people in the world are willing to start from nothing again after they lost all their dreams.

Family picture, my mom, my brother, my sister, me, and my dad

I wish I could have spent more time with him when we were kids. I never knew that my experiences with my brother would be something that I missed the most in the future. After graduating, my brother went to Makassar, Sulawesi—the other island in Indonesia that is located exactly in the south of Philippines. Meanwhile, I went to college in the United States. We are so far away, on the opposite side of the earth. Now, I was alone. Again. I regret all the things that we should have done as brothers when we were kids. I wish I could tell whatever stories I had to him because I knew that he would listen to me. He would listen to me, because he is my brother; just like the turtles in the glass box.