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My brother and I haven’t spoken in over a decade. Our relationship was always rocky, built on the foundation that he was an achiever and I was not. The last time I saw him was my eighteenth birthday; he found me outside and advised me that the family would be better without me in it. I believed him, and I left. No one ever tried to find me.

I think about that premise, that I am some force of bad and that people will only thrive in my absence. I cultivated a life on my own by touching others’ lives in periphery: a ghost appearing at a party, a template of a person whose filled-in details would be too much a burden for others to perceive.

I have my work, and my art, and my numbers. I could spend all day with numbers, quietly working out the math and probability of banalities. It’s not too bad, all considered. I am here and alive and existing: a probability so small it’s basically zero.

I think about my brother and his cruelty more than on occasion. His words echo in my head and keep me at a distance. There’s a rational part that knows it isn’t me. Therapists have explained dysfunctional dynamics to me enough that I could write a thesis on the issue. Still I worry about any truth to his words. My family is thriving without me. That anecdotal evidence is more powerful than any textbook I could read.

People are numbers, too. Each human a product of two sets of three billion base pairs encoded in every cell. Some people turn out like my brother, some turn out like me. I wonder if cruelty is an inherited or acquired trait: if I see it in my brother, I must conclude it exists somewhere in me, too.

We had the same parents, the same school, the same exposure. He’s married, stable, and happy. I wonder, then, about the truth of his words versus the personal nature of my experience. I don’t wish to wed, nor have children, nor really stay or settle in one place. I don’t view myself as cruel. After a life alone, I’ve learned the value of letting myself be what others want or need. They don’t need to know me. If they look too close — if they kick the tires and look under the hood — I worry that they will see what my brother did all those years ago: something predetermined and unworthy and frightening, written into the fundamental blocks of my very being.