When I Was Her Age

I shouldn't be jealous of her. 

She has her whole life ahead of hers, and I have mine.

We both have decades left to create ourselves.

She is full of life and determined to build a snowman in the snow that never comes.

She is my sister.

When I was her age, I wanted to be dead. 

There was nothing wrong with me, and yet I felt the blood should drain from me, leaving me as cold as I felt.

I was utterly alone, lost to myself and those who loved me.

I still remember the day my only friend said she had been putting up with me in hopes that I would go away.

I tried.

I failed.

I got help.

I cope now, for the most part.

The scars don't fade, but they are less a part of me than they were.

I lost years of my life to an illness that destroyed who I was.

Picking up the pieces meant bleeding on the broken shards.

It meant realizing I could not rebuild myself because I had not had a chance to be a person before I shattered.

When I hear my sister laughing with her friends, I find yet another hole in the person I am trying to be.

When I see her, she who cut her hair the way I had it when I was yet that young, I look in the mirror and try to see myself if I had been like that instead.

I have lived so long with this that it is hard to think of myself as separate from it.

I would not wish it on my worst enemy, and I would surely live it all again before I would let my sister feel an ounce of it.

And I am sure that she is the image of me in a lake, and the waves that make us different distort the space between us.