I think a part of me knew he was going to die.

He's been fighting for six years. Six long years of not being able to breathe without his oxygen cart (or his oxygen machine when he's sleeping) and six long years of suddenly rushing to the hospital in the middle of the night or during the day when he couldn't breathe all of a sudden. Six long years of me worrying about whether or not today was my last day with him. Why wouldn't I worry about him? He's my brother.
Or rather, he was.

On the day he died, it was a snowy day in Manhattan. It wasn't a snow storm, thankfully. He never liked those. Instead, light flakes of snow different in ways that couldn't be seen with the naked eye plunged down from the sky and danced as the wind tossed them back and forth and eventually rested on the already white ground. Even though he hates snow storms, he still loves snow. When we were kids, he would always tug on my sleeve and beg me to go out in the snow so we could build a snowman or have a snowball fight with some of the kids that lived in the same building as us. Even though I hate snow with a passion, I loved spending time with my older brother because he was my idol as a child. I did all that I could to be like him. I ate the same food as him, I liked the things that he liked (Which was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Pokemon) and hated the things that he hated (Which were the standard things that girls loved like My Little Pony and Dora The Explorer). I even remember trying to cut my hair like his and my mom told me that I wasn't a little boy, even though she allowed me to wear clothes that boys my age typically wore. But I was a good child and I obeyed. Charlie laughed at me when he heard me say that I wanted my hair like his.
"You don't have to be just like me Brittany." He told me. "You should be your own person."
I thought that this was crazy at first but him and I eventually grew older and closer apart. When he was ten and I was eight, we went to different schools and started doing our own activities so we wouldn't have time to hang out together like when we were kids. It was only until four months after his thirteenth birthday when we finally started to get close again. And the only reason was because he got sick. And not just your average sick when you have a cold for a couple of days and you spend those couple of days lying in bed. No, he got cancer. Lung cancer to be exact.

It all started when he got a cough. We didn't think much of it because we thought it was just a cold so we had him stay home from school for a couple of days and we thought that he would be better.
We were wrong. And what we didn't know is that we were about to be dragged into six years of hell not just for Charlie, but for us as well.

The coughing kept getting worse and worse. There were times where he would cough nonstop for fifteen minutes or more. We finally took him to the hospital when he coughed up blood. I almost threw up when I came in to check on him in his room after another one of his coughing sessions had begun. I screamed for Mom and Dad and they ran up to his room and somehow managed to remain calm as they called for an ambulance. They told me to keep him calm as they went outside to wait for it. I did this but softly talking to him and rubbing his back as he cried into my lap, his mouth still having blood on it. It got on my jeans but I didn't care at that moment. I was terrified for him. I was only eleven and here I was comforting my thirteen year old brother, who I had looked up to for most of my life. I didn't think he would ever cry or get sad about something, let alone sob into my lap the way he did. I was torn away from my beloved brother when the paramedics came rushing in and took him down the ambulance waiting outside. It was a true inconvenience that we lived on the top floor.