When my brother and I were both in university, we lived in cities about an hour apart. We grew up about another hour away, so to visit my brother my dad had to drive through the city I lived in, passed the campus for my university, to get to the city my brother lived in. You could literally see the buildings on campus from the interstate through the city.

He would call me about once a month to tell me about the awesome weekend he just had visiting my brother and seeing one of their school football games. He would rave about how much fun it was and always say “you should come down too next time”. I would always tell him I probably would if he would tell me about it before the trip instead of after…

I started to resent my brother being the “obvious favorite”. For years we barely spoke. We reconnected like a decade later when we happened to live in the same city. One night around a few beers, we started hashing out old shit, and I brought up him being dad’s favorite and all the trips dad made to visit him.

That’s when I found out my dad made it all up. Our dad only visited my brother’s campus twice, the day he moved into the dorms and the day he graduated…