The One You Barely Were. The One I Am.

I have never wished to be anything other than myself, though I have always felt that life wanted something else from me. Not a completely new version, but perhaps just a narrow copy of the one who came before me—my brother, the one who was supposed to be me. Life itself has tried to shape me into him, as if I were merely a weak substitute for a loss it could never reconcile with. And maybe it’s true—that it’s not I who live my life, but he who lives on through me. And how could the boy I am then, trapped in his eternally swaddled body, wish for anything other than to live?

It’s unreal. It felt like a near-death experience just to learn it. I sat with my pulse at rest while a car came the wrong way, sweeping past the vehicle in front of it, a mere car-width away from taking me to whatever fate awaited us. But at the last moment, it swerved, and I was numb. I could have condemned him and his entire family, but I saw no point in it. I had no fight left in me for that.

When she told me—my mother—it felt like what that drive should have felt like. My pulse hammered in my ears, my tongue swelled and tingled, as if it blocked my breath. My heart scraped like an unsmoothed saw blade grinding against an old log. The person I hold so dear—she who gave me life. She who taught me what things should be held sacred. She who had borne this pain with a smile on her face, saying she loved me. She might as well have been the one who brought life to everything, for didn’t she do that for me?

I can’t remember the questions I asked, but I know I asked them. And I danced carefully around her, as she sat shrouded in shadows. Her brown eyes had been painted with tar that had dripped and formed a crescent beneath the clear white.

Did you have a name?

I don’t remember if I asked, and I dare not ask now. For I fear I tempt fate by sending myself to you, my dearest brother. Life has no other ambition than to ensure our paths cross. And maybe it has come one step closer to taking mine, as I sit here in sickness and cry over things that were never or will never be.

If anyone asks, what should I say, that I mourn? We never met, except through our mother’s love. The love that breathed enough life into me to send me on all kinds of journeys. And perhaps, when I journey further, I will finally meet you. But which of us will I be then?