My brother was a whopping eleven years older than me, so I don't remember much of when he was still living with us during his college years. I was only thirteen when he moved out. But he was always weird. His self-professed hobby was to watch people. I remember there were times when he would pick me up from school, and, as we drove home in the afternoon sunlight, we would see something like a group of children walking home in their uniforms, and those little mundane scenes--old ladies feeding birds, shops closing down for the day--were heartbreaking to him. He took pictures of seemingly innocuous things. He was very nostalgic about things that had never happened to him.

I distinctly remember that on a weekly basis he would sit in a corner of his cramped room and scribble into an old notebook that he used for school. Sometimes I would ask him what he was drawing or writing. He would of course tell me to leave. He kept it well-hidden when he wasn't writing, because several times during my childhood I looked for it while he wasn't home, and never found it.