Your older brother's apartment smells like Bacardi and cigarette smoke. There are shot glasses of vodka placed strategically around the apartment as a desperate attempt to solve the fruit fly problem. When you sleep over you have to move a month's worth of dirty clothing from the couch to the floor. As you lay down you try your best to ignore the various mystery stains. The sink has no running water, and is instead filled with empty sour monkeys. The smell of his favorite beer is ingrained into your nose, because he’s been drinking it since you were 13.
You always thought he was the coolest person alive until one day he tells you to do your best to not end up like him. Since before you hit puberty you had dedicated yourself to becoming as cool as him. He takes a deep hit of his favorite Camel blue cigarette, as he tells you this. When you were younger, sometimes he'd send you to the corner store with ten dollars to buy his favorite cigarettes. In return he would let you sip from the wine he and his girlfriend enjoyed on the bleachers of the basketball courts we spent our entire summers at. You hated the taste of wine, but you loved for him to know you could drink like a grown man. His girlfriend would grab your cheek when she saw you, and would introduce you to her friends as her “little baby brother”. You pretend to be annoyed, and tell them to stop, but on the inside you liked it.
Of course, you two aren't related, but you spent more time at his apartment than at your own home. To this day you still credit most of the things you know to him. He doesn't think he's a good role model, but you've always wanted to be just like him. When you were 15 he told you to use drugs responsibly, and when he noticed you smoking weed too much he wouldn't waste a second calling you an idiot. He's always tried his hardest to make sure you're ok, and you've always tried your hardest to impress him. When you'd see him with his beer before the middle of the day, you wished you could tell him to slow down how he does to you.
As the two of you sat on your skateboards, sharing a four dollar plate of fried rice he told you he thinks you both live a “faster life” where it's easy to get caught up in substances as a desperate attempt to slow things down. You didn't understand fully, but you started to understand the beer and spliff he always had in his hand. I think he was telling me that he had been caught, and was subtly warning me of the dangers of our own brain. Sometimes you think he sees himself as someone who can only drag you down, and now you wish you could have told him how much you admire him. You think every beer he drinks and every spliff he smokes the less he likes himself, and you start to understand.