'Half'

Four years and everyday I wonder, are you safe?
Are you happy, are you living.

What am I to you now, the runaway, the bitch, the other, the ‘half-sister’. I think I fear the latter the most. “Half” as if somehow that made me love you at a demarked store rate.
Four years… you have both played the circle game from four to eight and five to nine…every day I look at your pictures and talk to your voices in my head, I answer the endless stream of questions I know you both no longer ask, I complete the mid-sentence thoughts I know you no longer think, I run wild with you. And then I stop short to realize you no longer run.

Does she oil your hair every Sunday? Does she let you watch TV till nine? Does she make French fries on week days? Does she do the voices in The Little Mermaid? Does she do the Hokey Pokey to Little Richard? Does she force you to read stories and tell them? Does she answer all the questions you ask, and all the ones you don’t? Does she tuck you in bed every night? Does she take pictures while you sleep? Does she sing 50’s be-bop?

Why am I so jealous of her, she is your mother after all? We both abandoned you, her first, me second. But I am, I am green inside out, to think that you aren’t dreaming any longer. To think that you no longer wear your hair long in pigtails, to think that you no longer wear pretty pinks and silly yellows. I am black thinking you no longer laugh as much, or break into song for no reason. I am beyond jaded to think that you are no longer children, that she constantly screams at you to grow up.

And then I think ‘who am I’? I am only the sister, who lived alongside you, who left and who you will forget in another four years. I can live with that, because I remember. I saw a picture of you both today, standing beneath the porch, in front of the blue Benz, waiting to go to school.
Neither of you are smiling.

This I can’t live with.