Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [65]
Micah trained with me the following summer, and as a senior he’d become one of the better runners in the area. At most meets, we would both finish in the top three, but Micah never became as serious about running as I did.
After graduating, he went to California State University at Sacramento and put his energies into enjoying life instead. He dated one beautiful girl after the next, skied on the weekends, took up snowboarding, and fell in love with mountain biking. He went boating and water-skiing, and spent weekends in San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, or Yosemite. He went white-water rafting, and eventually mastered it well enough to become a guide. He was a member of a yacht crew that raced on weekends. He moved into an apartment near campus and joined other students at bars and nightclubs. Every weekend, it seemed, he was doing something new, something exciting, reveling in his newfound freedom. At the same time, he kept up his grades, and worked as an intern at a commercial real estate firm.
I, on the other hand, spent my senior year as a nervous wreck. Good grades had become an obsession; I was on the verge of graduating valedictorian and didn’t want this honor to slip from my grasp at the last moment. Furthermore, I knew that if I continued to run well, there was a chance I’d get a scholarship—a goal I’d set for myself—but I had yet to receive an offer, and wouldn’t until nearly April. I continued to work thirty-five hours a week and spent whatever free time I did have with my girlfriend. The stress of keeping it all going led to horrible bouts of insomnia. I slept less than three hours a night, and felt constantly on edge.
Part of me envied the kind of life that Micah was living. I admired his ability to simply live, without having to achieve. In the hallways at school, I’d listen to friends describing their weekends at Folsom Lake, or how much fun they’d had skiing at Squaw Valley. Maybe I should try to have more fun, a voice would whisper inside me, but every time I heard it, I forced myself to push the voice away. With a shake of my head, I’d tell myself that I didn’t have time, that I couldn’t risk injury, that I was too close to the finish line to quit now.
But I wasn’t necessarily happy. My goals had become ends in and of themselves, and there was little joy in pursuing them. Nonetheless, I somehow survived. And just as I wanted, I graduated valedictorian. A month earlier, after running one of the fastest 800-meter times in the country, I’d accepted a full athletic scholarship to the University of Notre Dame. And three months later, I would be living in South Bend, Indiana, two thousand miles from the only family I’d ever known.
Part of me didn’t want to go off to college. If you live the sort of childhood I did, you’re forced to bond with your family. My brother and sister, along with my parents, had been the only constants in my life, and though I’d known for years that it was inevitable, it was still a little frightening for me to leave them behind.
While I’ve written a lot about Micah and myself, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that my sister was any less important to me. In the early years, my sister and I played together as much as Micah and I did, albeit in different ways. She was always the one I talked to about our adventures; she was the one I talked to when I was having trouble in my relationship with Lisa. In the end, I talked to my sister about everything I’d felt growing up, and my sister, more than anyone else, seemed to understand why I’d become the person I had. Even better, my sister loved me, and she alone seemed to have the ability to put things into perspective for me. My struggles had always been her struggles, and hers had always been mine. And if you ask my brother, he would say exactly the same things about her, for he had the same type of relationship with Dana that I did.
Toward the end of my senior year, I remember hearing my sister crying in her bedroom. After knocking, I went in and found her sitting on the bed, her face in her hands.