My mother always says that it's easier to get sick when you're not happy. I never thought of my sister as sick —nor unhappy. In my mind, she is a facade of ice and flinging thorns, but those were not signs of illness. Those bouts left as quickly as they appeared, everconstant, but who ever faulted the sea's tide? Coming and going. Back and forth. Rage then peace. How presumptuous of us to believe in escaping fate —that we alone have conquered the universe? (We can never escape who we are. Because the natural world dictates order, and who are you to believe that you can defy it?) *** (But I don't care about the grand scheme of things —my existence is infinitesimal but this right now, is everything to me.) The universe as I know it holds its breath when the doctors discover a cyst. It is morbidly fitting, in some way. Finally, there's an explanation to her chronic illnesses, daily migraines, and lighting-fast irritability —a festering mass seeping god-knows-what into her hormones is irrevocably causal. The hospital stay neatly wrapped up in a bow. (Her mysterious illnesses are finally explained with such a simple answer. But if those came from the cyst, what did the cyst come from?) *** One never finds closure with its hand outstretched. (That answer is too simple. Too easy. It's not the real reason, just a convenient excuse.) It is always found in the dead of night when you least anticipate it, the smell of dust motes potent and lingering in the air. And you'll wonder how you ever missed it -the stench of regret that has seeped into the very foundations of your home. (The nagging feeling that there's something wrong, the axis of my world is a little tilted, makes me question everything I know. What did the cyst come from? Some monumental event happened within this home, some pernicious evil thing, but how could we not have known?) *** We draw nearer to an impossible doomsday with each lapse around the sun. It hums a negentropic melody of order into fruit cores, snowflakes, and whale songs while our solar system spins farther out into the dark edges of the galaxy. (Order within disorder. To keep you distracted from what's really out there. But you don't even notice what's right in front of you). Trying to escape some greater being. Some harbinger of fate. You can keep your eyes closed but you will never escape who you are. (Denial never equals absolution). We are destined to keep moving away, you know. Since the dawn of time -since before there were trees and grass, before there was a spark of life, before there was anything, before there was you and I (closed, bounded, compact, bright, a severed red string clutched in one hand –Did you let go? Did I?), there was a young Chinese girl about to make the biggest mistake of her life. She wears my mother's face. She doesn't go to Beijing, she marries that man, she spends the next thirty years living as a shade and I can do nothing. So when they ask me what I know of sacrifice, I can only see the years etched onto my mother's brow -each line a time she chose someone else over herself. If I could set her free at the cost of my life, I would do so in every timeline and in a heartbeat. They ask me what I know of willpower and I can only see you (carbon copy of my mother –don't let the cycle repeat. Run away from here. You are not the chains that bind you. Do what she could not do.). Narcissism is my greatest flaw. (How could I not have known?) I'm selfish and short-sighted, and failed for the longest time to see those around me when I'm wrapped up in my head. Perhaps I still fail to see my sister clearly, even now. She is 5 years old and begging me to play with her. She is 10 years old and waiting for me to put down my phone. She is 15 years old and is no longer asking me to hang out. (And there, in the absence of her like a gaping wound with no blood, I start to notice. Is it too little, too late?) But I know her at 17 years old now and we are on good terms. (And does that remedy all the years she went unnoticed?) So why does she never stop catching a cold (because of me?), why does her head never stop hurting (because of me?), why does she hear voices (because of me?), why does she shut us out (because of me?), why does she insist on making her soul impenetrable? (And here I am, still making it about me.) It takes a laparotomy for me to admit that I'm deluded -have been deluded, and that I've played bigger hand than I imagined in who she is today. (Absolution is bitter and cold but you have to swallow.) Because I see her only in snapshots and have convinced myself that she is invincible. So calm, cool, collected at 17 that I forget she is still 5 years old, still 10, still 15, still wondering what is taking me so long to get ready to play with her. (Each year builds a layer of malignant tissue like the rings that build the tree.) I forget that she has not lived any life where I do not exist, that she is composed of every memory we share, that I'm worried about the narrow, malnourished rings of a tree trunk but the tree has been cut (too little, too late, you should have noticed sooner), and that her cyst probably anchored itself onto the abandonment that I sowed into her cells. *** Everything we know about the natural state of the world suggests that a universal entropy is inevitable. (Since the start, the galaxy is expanding and we move farther and farther away from everything. Anything. Where did we come from? Where are we going?) But my sister stands tall, unyielding in singularity, with a shield of iron will bequeathed by our mother. (Wrenched from her grasp, unknowingly). She is effortlessly everything I wanted to be at her age, perhaps even now. The wind billows through her hair and I think of how infinite I hope for her to be -how caustic I caused her to be. (I did this. But stay nonetheless.) There will come a time where the sun shines on us again and it will be there to stay. (There is a way out if you want to try. With me.) Somewhere, a rose and iris flower bloom in tandem, winter frost creeps onto a fallen leaf, scathing wit meets romanticism, and you will gaze into a yellow-orange sunset and know that we have chosen to be together in all the ways we can be.