The Striking Thing

am i the asshole? (no, actually, that was the prompt...)

My dad was a very passionate man: I use the word passionate not because I won’t admit that he was a lot of other things too but rather because I know that whatever he did, he felt deeply about, and expressed that loudly in whatever way he knew how; I use the word ‘was’ not because I can say with certainty that he is no longer, but because he started talking with a monotone when he turned forty-four. Nobody could ever tell why, but I don’t think anybody ever asked. Either way, I saw my passionate father as a magic man and growing up I loved when people called me his twin: Dad and I looked the same and we acted the same and whenever we fought, which was often, my mom would tell him “you’ve really met your match.” Whenever we fought, we also fought until he won, until I renounced my position as the most stubborn person in a headstrong family. I wanted to be like him in one way and he wanted me to be like him in the other, and so when I was a preteen and had been long-categorized as hard to raise, we fought almost daily, though the worst of it was never over anything important. Either way, if my little sister was a doll of my mother and my golden brother was the american original it was nice to know my place in the family, at least for a while.