The bleach-white lights of the Mary-Greeley maternity ward were buzzing like the cicadas in May when you walked in. Except it was December. Dawn was no nearer than dusk, and outside, the first flakes of snow twirled like Tchaikovsky’s dancers before settling on the 2004 Toyota Sienna Appa had bought last month. There were two car seats strapped inside. One was worn from three years of spilled apple juice and Goldfish crumbs; the other still pristine in its pink.

You did not yet know why. You were still dawdling through the ammonia hallway, lumpy bear clutched in your left fist, a slice of whole-wheat toast in your right.

The room you entered was too bright. The lights louder, somehow, than in the hallway. You blinked, eyelashes brushing together with a faint flutter.

Then, you saw me.

Solemnly, you tore off a small piece of your bread and rolled it between your index finger and thumb to form a tiny pearl. Before you could place it in my mouth, though, Appa scooped you up. Laughing, he told you that I was not like one of the grey ducks you feed by the lake each Tuesday, but that I was your new little sister. 

That I am yours.

The fabric of your t-shirt shifted as you squared your shoulders. A life is a heavy thing for a little boy to hold.

Always the prettier one, you had big, glossy eyes, framed by the kind of lashes I pray for and my friends pay for: long and thick and slightly curled, so that when the sun hit your face, they scattered corn-silk shadows across your rounded cheeks.

You must know that you were never meant to protect me.

I was always the one throwing myself headfirst into danger: an arm broken trying to do a flip off the monkey-bars; skin smeared across the sidewalk failing to beat a dog in a race it did not sign up for; 1, 2, 3 teeth pulled out prematurely because I wanted to lose them first. 

You, a musician, a mathematician, slouched so that you were too short to go on the biggest roller coasters.

I am not sure if you remember my twelfth birthday. It was a Saturday, and I had it all planned out: fresh cinnamon doughnuts by the pier, window-shopping through Chinatown’s gaudy streets, ice skating and hot chocolate under the Union Square Christmas lights.

But more than anything, it was proof that we were tethered by more than just our shared blood. It was proof that you still cared.

I remember sitting alone at the dining table, tearing faded holiday wrapping paper into a little pile of confetti. To my left was a bar of Ghirardelli Peppermint Bark, but I wasn’t excited as I unwrapped it simply because you weren’t there to see it.

I poked at my soggy Cheerios while I waited for you to get ready. 

You took the long way, going through the living room, and then the kitchen, to get to me. 

“I have something today,” you said. “It’s a school thing. I can’t miss it. Sorry we can’t go to San Francisco.”

I would like to say that I took it stoically. Silently. Nodded my head and said that it wasn’t a big deal anyway.

I would like to say that I noticed the way your collarbones jutted sharp against your faded cotton shirt, how the grape-colored valleys beneath your eyes must’ve taken months to carve out. 

But that came later.

On the morning of my twelfth birthday, I threw the torn-up pieces of wrapping paper at you and got even madder when they just floated to the floor. I stood up, shoved your sharp shoulders into the fridge, and ran to my room. And there, I cried to my nest of stuffed animals, telling them that no one, in the history of the world, had ever felt a pain so big as what I felt right then.

Last night, I was looking through your closet for a spare sweatshirt, and I found an album filled with pictures of you from before. Everything was in pastels. Lemongrass for your first airplane ride, amber for that day at the pumpkin patch, periwinkle for your viola recital, buttercream for your last day of elementary school. I don’t remember the last time I saw you at home in anything other than shades of silt.

I want to grab the girl standing next to you in those photos and shake her. Shake her until her stained-glass brain shatters to reveal the monochrome boy she shares a bathroom with.

Instead, she trembles. She trembles through the tears that pool in my eyes, dripping down my face to collect in the hollows of my clavicles while I say sorry, i’m so sorry i didn’t know and i love you into a voice recording I will never send. 

At some point, I became a sickly child. Not in the way of heart monitors and see-through hospital gowns, but in the way of children whose immune systems never learned to cope with the germs inherent to a public-school education.

It was February, and I was burning. The fine hairs at the nape of my neck were plastered to my skin with sweat, and my mouth tasted like stale Gatorade. You were sitting at our desk, chemistry books splayed out across the surface.

I shifted on top of the sheets, searching for a patch of cool fabric to soothe my feverish body.

“You have to be faking it,” you said, pen still scratching out calculations on the worksheet in front of you. “There’s no way you’re actually sick every time. You can admit it; I won’t tell.”

I scratched at the warmth blooming up my neck. I was embarrassed, then offended by how easily you could invalidate the sickness that raged like wildfire through my body. 

There was a thermometer on the bedside table, and, popping off the plastic cap, I tucked the cold metal beneath my tongue. It beeped, and I read out the result triumphantly: 101.8 degrees.

I didn’t realize how lucky I was: that there were thermometers that could measure my suffering, X-rays that proved my pain. If I were to search through your brain, there would be no broken bones, no torn tissue for me to find. 

But I hope you know that I would never have needed any proof to believe you.

I don’t remember how it started. When a boy that taught himself to cry without tears heard the word depression for the first time and understood what it meant. 

For me, those years were a blur of suffocating bedroom walls and ears pressed to a crack in the door trying to understand what was happening, why our family was no longer whole.

I don’t think I can ever know what they were like for you. What you felt when our parents refused to understand how someone could be so sad that they forget they want to live. All I saw was your locked bedroom door and a brother who no longer had time for me.

Looking back, I can see how my silence looked to you like agreement instead of the ignorance that it was; how our family was split in two and to you, we were not on the same side.

Now, there are two flights, three buses, and 14 hours between you and me. Now, there is space to think.

Amma calls you every day, but you only pick up half the time. Your voice is faint when I sit next to her on the couch, but I can still hear you telling her that you had eggs for breakfast, and that you and your roommate bought a space heater because December is colder than you expected on the East Coast. You say you won’t be home for Christmas.

I translate it to mean that you are doing well. I must translate because you will not call me yourself, and for that, I cannot blame you. I am grateful that you found a city and a home where you could heal, and I am sorry that I am not a part of it.

Today, I am turning seventeen. Today, I am the same age you were when you grew wings and flew as far as you could from everything familiar. When you flew away from me.

And I wonder if, today of all days, you think of me. Can you picture me, sitting on the floor of your childhood home, bathing in the silence of a house too large for three bodies to fill? My fingers are pruned and wrinkly from the steam, and I think I want to leave. And then I think of how silent the house will be with only two people in it, and I want to let angry tears fall down my face to fill the tub because I know I have to stay. Our parents cannot lose me too.

I know that this is not my fault. Neither is it yours, but the unfairness of an absent brother and a silent sister is still ours to bear. So maybe this is what okay looks like. You with your space and me with my words, both of us healing the only honest way we know how.

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Tanvee is a student-writer from the California Bay Area. Besides writing, she enjoys making soup and playing with her cats.