Today, I baked for the first time I can remember since last Christmas in Australia. For some, that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if you know me, you will know that I love to cook and bake, and having spent nearly a year hiatus away from baking seems very unlike me. I made chocolate chip cookies with a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated, and the cookies came out beautifully.

While washing the dishes after, I remembered the times when I’d come home for winter or summer breaks during college, and I’d bake different things or offer to make dinner for my family. Since I’d cook, it was expected that Ed would wash dishes. One time, the dishes had been piled up in the sink for a while (that is all relative; in my parents’ house, if the dishes are in the sink for more than 15 minutes after dinner, someone’s going to get yelled at. That someone was Ed or me, or both). I called out for Ed and told him it was time to wash the dishes. Sometimes, he’d give me some attitude and say, “Why do I have to wash the dishes?” I’d respond, “Well, I made dinner/made cookies.” He’d retort back, “No one asked you to make dinner/bake cookies.” Then we’d go back and forth bickering with each other, and in the end, he’d wash the dishes. And I would help him because I knew he hated it.

It’s bittersweet to remember these little tiffs that we’d have because now I know that I will never have a small or big fight with my brother ever again. We’ll never agree or disagree on anything, or debate over something that is completely meaningless. There’s no future left with Ed and Yvonne as brother and sister. All that is left are our photos, the gifts he has given me over the last 27 years, and my fragile memories of my big brother.

Maybe up in heaven, he has found someone else to temporarily act as his little sister, who will make him wash dishes after she has baked brownies or cookies. But I’m pretty sure she won’t love him the way I do. She also probably won’t bake as well as I do, either.

Actually, heaven shouldn’t have any dirty dishes, so maybe they are just gorging on cookies together and awaiting me to join them.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been changing up my morning workout routine to incorporate Bikram yoga every Thursday. Class begins at 6:15am, which means I need to wake up by 5:45 to get out the door at 6 to walk over to the yoga studio. Today, though, class started at 6, so I figured waking up just fifteen minutes earlier at 5:30am wouldn’t be a huge difference for me.

I was wrong. At about 2pm today, I started crashing pretty hard, and I almost wanted to pass out over my computer.

I started this morning workout routine back in April of this year. As I was trying to fight my drowsiness at work, I thought about how I never told Ed that I started this workout routine. I never told him I was determined to get in shape again. In fact, because I was so concerned about how he was doing and ways he could better his life, I realize that in the last few months before he left us, when we’d talk on the phone, I barely told him anything that I was up to. I did tell him I was looking for a new job, and that was really it.

It hurts to know that he didn’t know these things about me. Maybe he would have wanted to know, or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe if he knew I was driven to do certain things, then maybe he would have felt more driven to live. Or maybe I am just making that up right now because I wish that could have been the case. Despite our closeness and love for one another, there will always be things that we did not know about each other that were important to us. I suppose that’s the way relationships are – you can’t always share everything. But like a quote I once read from Rainier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which suddenly came to me just now, “infinite distances” exist among the closest of people:

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people, infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole, and before an immense sky.”

A distance that feels like infinity now exists between us. But one day, when we are together again, I will learn again to love the expanse between us.

The other day, a friend and I were discussing how one should approach a friend who has recently experienced a death of someone close (gee, I wonder who we were referencing during this). My friend, who has also experienced a number of deaths last summer (it was seriously the Summer of Death for both of us), said that oftentimes, because death is not a comfortable topic, people tend to veer away from it because they are scared of offending those who grieve. So we should forgive them and not take it personally. I said that I acknowledge it’s uncomfortable; obviously no one wants to deal with or talk about it, especially those who are experiencing it. But in the best case scenario, one who truly loves and cares about you will ask you how you are doing in that respect. If the grieving person chooses not to share, fine, but at least give him a choice to share. Hesitantly, he agreed I was right.

It also reminded me of a video I recently watched about how people conduct themselves around others and the types of relationships they choose or choose not to form. Perhaps the reason that those who choose not to ask because they say they are fearful of offending are really just scared about how they themselves will react to such raw, deep, and real feelings. Oftentimes in today’s fast-paced world, we form “friendships” with others in which all we do is talk about what we are doing and when we are doing it. Feelings and vulnerable thoughts aren’t shared because that seems like too much, too frightening. Do I really want to know this person on that level? How will what I learn about this person affect me?

Maybe what we all need is to expose ourselves just a little more, and be just a little bit more vulnerable. We’d be more real human beings then, and maybe we could attain just a fraction of the genuineness Ed had (that apparently intimidated a lot of people).

Tonight, my former colleague friend and I went to dinner at Banjara in the East Village. We both had our own lamb dumpakht (a Northern Indian/Mughal dish in which a meat curry is cooked and encased in a beautiful naan-like bread), shared a kati roll, and complimentary mango kulfi. The dumpakht was delicious – thick, rich, savory yet sweet at the same time, and so satisfying with the bread encasing it. It was like an Indian version of a chicken pot pie – just with lamb and slightly healthier bread.

During our eating and our chatter, I thought about Ed and how much he loved Indian food. Even when I wasn’t with him and he’d have an Indian craving, he’d go by himself to Star India or India Clay Oven in the Richmond District for their lunch buffet and eat to his heart’s content. Once, we tried to introduce our mother to Indian food by taking her to India Clay Oven. She picked at her food the entire time, which made her feelings obvious. At the end of it, Ed asked her if she liked the food. My mother usually doesn’t like to explicitly offend anyone, so she responded, “I really liked this bread (the naan). What’s it called?” At least we tried to get her out of her comfort zone, even if we failed.

Ed would have really liked the dumpakht. I wish I could have taken him here when he was visiting in July 2011. He probably would have devoured his, and eaten what I couldn’t finish. He always had a big appetite.

Today, Chris and I went all over Manhattan for Open House New York (OHNY) weekend, an annual event that happens in New York City where residents and tourists can get free access to many private innovative homes, public sites, and landmarks that are usually not open to the public. The description doesn’t sound that fascinating until you go through the OHNY handbook to realize exactly how creative and mind-boggling a lot of the architecture is here in the city, especially given that the majority of these spaces are really small. In total, we saw eight sites ranging from a private home built from a former garage and petroleum tank (the tank now houses two beds!) to a Frank Lloyd Wright-style, two-floor home of an architect on the Upper West Side. Needless, to say, we were both exhausted at the end of the day. Last year, we only went to two sites in two days.

One thing I noticed during our constant running around today that had nothing to do with OHNY itself is that everywhere we went, I saw a Missing Person sign posted with a man’s face on it. It was probably on every other block we walked on. It made me feel empty every time we passed by it again and again because it reminded me of the less than 18 hours when my brother was missing. How much hope can one realistically have when a loved one has been missing for 12 hours or 24, a week or a month, a year or ten years? When Ed went missing, I knew he was definitely gone forever after just six hours; I could feel it in my gut. But there are always those more fortunate instances, such as the recent Ariel Castro kidnappings, where missing people turn up after over a decade. It takes a lot of faith to keep believing someone is out there for that long. I don’t know if I could keep believing.

We took Ed (through Bart) with us today during our open house viewings. I know he enjoyed his time (and was probably the most fascinated by the beds in the petroleum tank). He always never understood how anyone could live in such tiny, cramped spaces in New York, but these spaces we saw today give hope that sometimes, you can get have more light and sense of space with just the right amount of creativity and time.