the one who stood first

Play "Lag Ja Gale" before you read this.

Let it settle first.

I came first.

August 8th. That's me.

She followed September 4th — like one month apart wasn't close enough, like she couldn't stand the idea of me being alone in this world for too long.

And somehow, within that one year of being alive, she had already figured out how to take care of me better than I ever could her. I was the older one. I was supposed to be the one who paved the way, who stood in front.

But that was never how it went with us.

She was my front soldier.

Not because she was loud about it. She never announced it. She just quietly, consistently, stood between me and everything that wanted to reach me

the words people threw when they thought I wasn't listening, the silence that lived in our house, the specific kind of cruelty that only people who know you can aim right.

She caught all of it before it landed.

So I never had to.

And I never learned how to catch it myself.

I used to care what people thought about me. Every little comment, every look, every whispered thing. It used to crawl under my skin and stay there.

Not anymore.

But losing that fear didn't make me free. It just made me realize something I didn't want to realize...

I was never actually brave. I just had her. She was the brave one. I was standing behind her the whole time, thinking it was me.

The burns in my life never came from strangers.

Strangers don't know you well enough. They don't know which parts of you are still soft, still healing, still raw from the last time. But the people in your own home do. The friends who sat next to you for years do. They know exactly where to press.

My parents. My classmates. Someone I once called my best friend.

Their names are sitting in my chest right now and I can't write them here. Not yet. Maybe not ever. She always said some battles aren't worth starting and she was usually right about these things.

She was usually right about everything.

I was never the wanted child.

I say that the way you say something you've made peace with quietly, flatly, without asking for sympathy.

The house just had a way of making it clear. Not always in words. Sometimes just in the temperature of a room when you

walked into it.

She was the wanted one.

And she never once used that against me.

She took everything the world gave her so easily the love, the warmth, the way people's faces changed when she walked in and she made sure some of it found its way to me too. Without making it a favor.

Without making me feel small for needing it.

That's the part that undoes me most.

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