Growing up with a twin brother, I’ve always found myself in constant competition with my closely aged sibling. In elementary school, it was “Who could build the largest castle or spaceship out of Legos?” In junior high and high school, it was “Who could date the most girls?” To be fair, I gave it an honest shot: I made it to four “relationships” by the end of eighth grade, when I realized I just couldn’t do that anymore. My last relationship with a member of the opposite sex lasted approximately four days over Valentine’s Day, where it was well known that I was said girlfriend’s third choice after my brother, the punk rocker with a cool haircut in a local band and my soccer-star-best friend. In retrospect, I feel worse for the girl, rejected by two straight guys and left with the closeted gay guy who was only in it for the chocolates and sibling rivalry. Thankfully, by the end of high school I was out to my family and friends, allowing me to pursue the dating world on my own terms, with my parent’s denial of my sexuality and my brother’s uncomfortable apathy leaving the path wide open for me to leave for college and date whomever I chose.

From there, my story gets hazy — as I danced in and out of awkward college relationships — with me leaving the country (leading to awkward international relationships) and returning to a world I had abandoned years before. All of a sudden, the summer after graduation, I had moved back in with my parents, for a short three months, thankfully, and was faced with a new sort of family situation. Despite winning the race of being born first (by a mere minute!), my brother definitely beat me in the race to date a significant other for the longest period of time. Now a part of our family, I can’t imagine my brother without his girlfriend. Even their personalities have merged, leaving me to wonder, as a single guy, how much of my personality is actually my own and how much I annexed from my ex-boyfriend during our relationship. Are there such things as completely pure personalities, or are we all merely hybrid characters, Priuses unto ourselves, driving around using our shared reserve battery power to make ourselves unique, but stopping to fill up on others’ personality traits when in need of gas? When I was young, I used to think of marriage as being the one and only ultimate union between two people, but having been in a long term relationship, I’ve come to think of time as the key union, and marriage the definition given to time to justify why two people would stay together. And while more and more states are paving the way for same sex marriage across the country, I couldn’t be farther from a potential marriage than ever before in my life.

This has become more and more acute in my mind as I become bombarded by various relatives asking if my brother and his girlfriend plan to get married. Just as I was the shoulder to cry on for my brother’s ex-girlfriends back in secondary school, so I’ve become the intermediary for my relatives to gather intelligence on my brother’s love life. Note: never once have my relatives or family inquired into my own romantic life: my overt singleism must be so potent that they would never even question if I was seeing someone or, God save us, myself thinking of getting married (I’m looking at you, Vermont and Iowa). Thankfully, I landed a job in DC, a comfortable distance from my hometown and the awkward romantic situations associated with it. And while I seldom visit my parents, mostly for holidays and special events, they are these short trips back that shed the most light into my current single life. It is when I go home, and see my family members, the majority with years of commitment to others, fine-tuned hybrid personalities, and cozy futures in the Establishment ahead of them, that I can’t help but turn upon myself. Who am I, really, when everyone around me has found someone else with which to successfully merge their lives?

I can’t claim to know the answer to the never-ending question of identity. But as I skimmed through a box of old college notes on my last visit home, I couldn’t help but marvel at my own rebirth over the past year. Sitting in my parent’s dusty, unfinished basement, with the water heater and occasional spider webs for company, I dug through my old anthropology notes: remnants of a major that now means very little to me. While I rummaged through boxes of discarded textbooks, I came across a flimsy paperback that was the cornerstone for a summer course I took titled, “The Archaeologist Looks at Death.” I remember reluctantly signing up for the class, what was supposed to be easy credits to finish my major before spending my final year of school abroad. As a student who focused his studies in linguistic anthropology, the study of current language movements, I had very little interest in the death rituals of ancient civilizations. “But hey,” I reasoned with myself before spring semester had let out, “who doesn’t need a little more King Tut in their lives?”

From the first day of the course, I become enthralled at how people, over the ages, dealt with death and how it translated, in many cultures, to a rebirth into the afterlife. Against the chill of the basement  six feet under, I pulled my baggy flannel shirt around me, adjusted my glasses, and perused page after page of dissected burial grounds, from the Russian Steppes to caves in Indonesia, each culture containing different rules for a proper burial. I thought of my own funeral of sorts, my menu-turned-mausoleum for my previous relationship. And like the ancient Egyptians, I had slowly started building my own pyramid. Where the ancient Egyptians used sand and stone to create magnificent shrines for their fallen leaders, I was in the process of creating just as amazing a structure: through a new social network of friends, a new life in a new city, and through a rediscovery of who I am, what I believe in, and what I want for myself, whether that be in a life shared with another or simply by myself. Much like a Nabataen admiring his work after finishing the construction of Al-Khazneh at Petra, I had my own Cheops and Khafra to boast about back in DC. And while most archaeologists believe these buildings to be constructed in order to admire the fallen, one can’t help but wonder if the designers of the pyramids of Egypt or ziggurats of Mesopotamia had some selfish aesthetic in mind: a fetish for the future, if you will. I wouldn’t doubt that those that lived in ancient civilizations who built glorious monuments to their fallen, if not the deceased themselves, had more in mind for the wonder the monuments would bring to later generations. Despite the archaeology textbook pointing out to me that these burial structures were meant to either assist the dead into the afterworld or act as some vessel until the dead could return, I can’t help but think of the Egyptian Queen Hatsepshut before she died, mapping out the plans for her grand temple, thinking to herself, “Damn, this shit will look good.”

And I have to admit, being Single, with a new social life and endless possibilities in front of me, I have to agree: that shit looks good.

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