Poems About Losing a Sibling

We have a language that no one else speaks. It's made of: the look across the table when Mom says something we'll discuss later in the car. The specific laugh that means I'm not laughing at the joke, I'm laughing at the fact that you're laughing. The text that says nothing but means call me. We fought like animals. Hair-pulling, name-calling, the nuclear option of telling Mom something the other one said in confidence. But when the boy broke my heart in tenth grade, you sat on my bed and did not say he wasn't worth it. You said: I'll hate him forever if you want me to. And you meant it. You still bring it up. He's married now with kids and you still narrow your eyes when his name comes up because a promise is a promise. Sisters share a closet and a bloodline and a particular talent for saying the cruelest thing with the most love. You know every version of me that existed— the braces version, the bad perm version, the version that cried at a commercial for long-distance phone plans. You have seen me at my ugliest and your response was always the same: move over. I'm getting in.

You came first. Four minutes. That's all it took for you to claim the title of oldest and never let me forget. We wore matching outfits until we were old enough to refuse. We shared a room, a face, a birthday cake with our names crowded together like an apology for not giving us separate days. Being someone's sister is one thing. Being your sister is a mirror that talks back. I see myself in your laugh. I hear myself in your anger. And when you cry— which you hate, which you hide, which you do in the bathroom with the fan on— I feel it in my own chest like a sound that travels through walls. We fought about everything— the front seat, the last cookie, whose friend was whose first— because when you share a beginning, you spend the rest of your life trying to prove you're a separate story. But we're not. Not really. We're the same story told from two directions. And when the world gets too loud, you are the only person who can look at me and say nothing and mean everything because you've known me since before knowing was a choice. Four minutes apart. A whole life side by side. And I would choose you even if biology hadn't chosen first.

At the funeral, someone repeats our joke and waits for the room to understand. They cannot. The meaning lived in a hallway, a bad holiday, and the face you made afterward. I laugh anyway, then hate myself for laughing, then hear your voice asking when grief became so badly behaved. I keep the joke. It still keeps part of you.