OK I wrote this for a college app but I'm still proud of it so...

Just like we’ve been doing for 5 years now, we’re lighting a candle this September third, for my brother.

“Sarah!”

I pull my earbuds out of my ears and press pause. As I get up I bang my knee, managing to spill the glass of water on my nightstand. I throw a dirty t-shirt over the spill and walk into Phillip's old room. There is only silence in here. The scratch of the match, the sputtering of the flame as it takes to the singular white candle, and my father’s too-loud breaths are the only things I can hear.

“Philip, wherever you are, we hope you’re safe,” my mother says gruffly. I can still hear the anger she harbors.

“My son…” dad trails off, trying not to cry, like he does every year. His room is almost the same as when he left (mom says disappeared, dad says “well, you know…”). His posters of the Beatles are still on the purple walls, as are the thousands of photos he took when he still lived here. His brown hair is still tangled in his hairbrush. He was always more meticulous that me. The inspectors tore his room apart, looking for clues or receipts, but even as a ten-year-old I knew that he was too smart to leave anything behind.

The day after he turned sixteen, Phillip started spending time with me. I thought that he wanted me to keep some secret of his. He already was paying me a dollar each week so I wouldn’t tell about how his early morning cigarette smoke wafted in through my window. I was eight then, and I loved him like Salvador Dali loved clocks. Eventually, I got used to his attention, but that didn’t stop me from wanting it. Sometimes he would bring me with him in mom’s car (with dad’s permission), and buy me pasta from his favorite Italian place, Fiorello’s, and let me watch him while he took pictures. Once, I dripped tomato sauce on my white dress and he took my picture and gave it to me. I slept with it under my pillow for a month.

On his seventeenth birthday, I bought him a purple and white striped sweater and matching hat, with a pompom on top. He never wore it. On the day after his eighteenth birthday, he left. I waited up for him two nights in a row, and when I searched through his drawers to take something that smelled like him, I noticed the striped sweater and hat were gone. I cried often in the mornings, but I couldn’t explain to my parents that it was because I missed his tobacco smell and the dollar he would leave me under my door every Friday. I cried at the thought of pasta sauce for a while, and up until I was thirteen, I refused to eat it.

On the day after my fourteenth birthday, Phillip started sending me emails with photo attachments. They were all pictures of him, in that ridiculous sweater I had spent all my nine-year-old-allowance on, posing in front of a monument halfway across the country, or the world. Often I had to search for hours to find him in the large crowds, but he was always somewhere in the shot. He wore round glasses—he must have exchanged his rectangular ones somewhere along his journey. I wrote back three pages full of questions after his first email, (Titanic Museum, Tennessee), but he didn’t respond. Three months later, he emailed me from the Taj Mahal. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. If I told dad, mom and the inspector would find out, the wild goose chase would resume, and if mom got ahold of Phillip's email address…I could just see his face, cigarette in hand, rolling his eyes at me in utter frustration. I was annoyed that he wouldn’t email me back, but I was afraid of showing my anger; I didn’t want him to stop emailing me altogether.

The photos came slowly but surely every couple of months. The only words that came along were Love, Phillip. I always sent him pictures back, or wrote him about my new favorite bands, hoping one day there would be more than those two words, but there never were. I liked to imagine him staying up to catch red-eye flights, stealing all the shampoo from hotels, skinny dipping in the ocean, never working. I envisioned his travels as glamorous and undaunting while in reality they were probably everything but.

My parents and I sit for a minute in my brother’s room-turned-shrine. I’m not the type to get emotional, but when they leave, I stay in his purple cave, tears that won’t fall pressing against my sinuses. After a few moments, I walk out of my brother’s room and refresh my email before going to dinner. New Message. I download the attachment. Phillip has grown some scruff since the last picture of him (he was in Orlando, Florida). It’s a picture of him (only him) in front of Fiorello’s. I’m Home. Love, Phillip.