Brotherly Love

Like the day you realize you are no longer physically bigger than your "little" brother, a life-changing moment for an older sibling is the first time you are referred to as "the other." "You must be David Salguero's sister. You look just like him." The phrase rings painfully through my ears as it attacks the last vestige of privilege afforded the elder child--my own identity. "Uh, yeah," I manage to get out. "David is my little brother," I say in attempt to re-institute the power hierarchy to which I've become accustomed. But it's too late: My days as the Salguero on campus have ended. When my brother matriculated with the Class of 2004, I became one of two.

Sibling pairs are quite common at Duke, and when David decided to attend school here, we were both excited. Only two years apart, we have always had an extraordinarily close relationship. Perhaps it is the by-product of being children of divorced parents, but David and I have always been a dynamic duo. Co-conspirators in crime, we spent most of our childhoods and adolescences together scheming to convince our mother to buy us dual mountain bikes or later, planning ways to steal the car for the day. And despite our different genders and polar-opposite personalities, we understood and supported one another through the different stages in our lives.

My first two years in college put a strain on that friendship because of the distance and difference in experience between college and high school. Being on the same campus, we thought, would bring us close together again. But surprisingly, his first year of college has been the most trying in our sister-brother relationship. It has also been the most important; our closeness has transitioned from a childhood connection to an adult one.

Your family members know you best and vice versa; consequently, it is difficult to accept a personality change in so close a relative. Seeing my brother on campus, at parties, at the Hideaway chillin' with seniors I didn't even know, I was taken aback by his easygoing manner. Within the family, David had always been the consummate jokester; still, everyone else knew him as the serious introvert of the Salguero clan. But the David who walked confidently on West Campus was a stranger in my eyes.

Likewise, I was a stranger in his. In college, where everyone is trying to find out who they are and what they believe in, your identity is constantly being redefined and challenged by your academics, your new friends and new life experiences. Like most of my classmates, I had drastically changed from the wide-eyed girl who first stepped on to Duke's majestic campus.

We were both confused by each other's changed personalities, so we stubbornly refused to acknowledge them. The distance between us widened. The power hierarchy I desperately clung to as the older, supposedly more knowledgeable, sister was dissolving. I couldn't accept that the new David was more my equal than was the inexperienced younger brother who needed my advice. It took seeing David through others' eyes for me to recognize the change in him, and it took our common experience as Dukies to bring us back together again.

My friends love hanging out with David, and my blockmates get excited when he stops by the apartment to eat pizza and drink with us. As I see him engaged in animated, intellectual conversations with my friends, my pride in him and respect for him grows. Even our own conversations have become vastly more meaningful: Knowing where I came from and who I was before my college transformation, David's insight into my life is more accurate than that of anyone else on campus. David is more my friend than my younger sibling.

And now as Blue Devils, we share more than just the same genetic code. We both know the exhilaration of winning a national championship as well as the frustrations of dealing with the ACES system. And these two bonds, being family and being classmates, I doubt will ever be broken.