Kimberlee K.

A couple months ago, while scrolling down the abyss of my Instagram Explore page, I came across a video of three brothers. They were sitting in their car, snacking, talking, occasionally arguing, and often laughing hysterically.

I watched, amused, and then kept scrolling. But over the course of the next week, clips from their videos popped up more and more, until I finally looked them up on YouTube.

The Sturniolo triplets—made up of Nick, Matt, and Chris—all have different temperaments, though they are all prone to talk over each other or shout when they feel they are being misheard, misunderstood, or not paid attention to. A feeling understood by any and all who grew up with siblings.

They are a decade younger than me, but I found their videos strangely comforting and cozy, because they made me think of and miss my siblings.

While we are still close, we no longer live together, so a natural distance has formed between us. We are all living independent lives. My brother lives with roommates, my sister lives with her husband, and I live alone. So as I watched the videos, continually amused by the comedic and at times chaotic nature of them, I found what I felt most was nostalgic.

Growing up, my brother, sister and I all shared a bedroom, and slept on a bunk bed with a pull-out trundle, stacked like a cake. No one could make us laugh harder, or annoy us easier, and no one understood us better than each other. We had traditions and habits, we knew each other’s routines and could work around them—or intentionally interfere, just to be a pain. We had our own language, that we still employ today, widening our eyes and having silent conversations across dinner tables and crowded rooms, or gripping onto each other’s shoulders, holding in a laugh. There are inside jokes that no one will ever truly understand, no matter how much context or back story we provide, and we can trigger an entire movie’s worth of memories with a single word or phrase.

Sometimes I miss when it was just the three of us. When our world was a little smaller and less complicated. When we could spend hours sitting around playing Nintendo 64, snacking, chatting, and getting annoyed at each other for absolutely no reason.

Siblings can be so special. Friends given to you from birth that will stand by you through every season of your life—no matter how dark, stressful, or weird. They can be sounding boards for your most outrageous questions and hiding places from your hardest days. Siblings can fill in the blanks when you say, “do you know what I mean?” and they can look your bad mood in the face and walk away, without ever making you question they’ll be there when you need them.

For a few weeks, I burrowed into the triplets’ videos, addicted to the comradery, the arguments with a quick rebound rate, and the belly laughs. They seem to capture so many of the best parts of having siblings, and watching them made me feel a little less lonely on days I didn’t get to see or talk to mine. It’s also fun to see the dynamic of other families after only ever knowing your own.

My siblings and I did not yell, but we could deliver killer death stares, dramatic eye rolls, and determined sessions of the silent treatment.

On school mornings, I remember getting unfathomably annoyed when my brother would knock on the door of the bathroom we shared, asking to go pee when I was finished brushing my teeth. “Whenever you get a chance,” he would say politely, and the phrase would instantly infuriate me so that I would glare at him as if he’d peed on the floor.

One time, as we walked out of a bowling alley, my sister huffed, “I am TIRED OF HER,” to my mom while pointing at me. I put my hand to my chest, fake wounded, even though I’d been continually poking her and was giggling under my breath.

I used to keep track of all the quotes my brother said, knowing he didn’t realize how funny he was (and is), one of my favorites being, “Kim! I think I saw a cabbage in the gutter, turn around!!”

If I were to scroll back into the archives of home videos, I could find footage of my brother and sister reporting the “news” as George Washcloth and Mrs. Floorhead, respectively, each report interrupted by my shaky camera work and nonstop laughter.

The other day, I texted my sister out of the blue to discuss a character from the Lion King 2.

And my brother texted me the rating of his plane landing. (9.5/10, which is insane.)

We have inside jokes that build and build, and conversations that can loop up down and around until we say, “anyway, going back to…”

Our relationship doesn’t exist on YouTube, but I like seeing hints of it in the triplets’ videos. I can recognize parts of each of us in each of them.

And when I say I get nostalgic, I don’t mean that our best years are behind us, and I don’t think that’s true for the triplets either. Our relationship has grown and evolved, and it strengthens as we become more rooted in who we are as individuals.

Just the other day we talked about getting matching tattoos, not because of who we were, or even because of who we are right now, but because of who we always will be for each other, and how, in some ways, it will always be the three of us, taking on the world together.