CW: Cancer
When you wait for your estranged sister’s surgery update, on April Fool’s Day, it feels like
The way skydiving must feel (I’m too scared to fall into sunsets; I crave stability of ocean’s motions, of vertebrae under the skin): all encompassing, a void, the moment you pull the chord and come out laughing that she’s still real. You’re still here.
A cosmic joke,
Or a sunset run backwards.
We haven’t spoken since she uninvited
Me to her wedding. A union we were not. If you want to pick apart the petals at the root: I’m hard to love; she loves my mom too much.
They checked her neck and found a swell
That shouldn’t be there. I rub my neck – my muscles – in Colorado, wondering what it feels like to be
Her. All I feel is tender skin, and pick-pocked scratch marks,
A flare. We are swans, not geese,
I swear. We want to belong together.
I’m guessing repairing, and learning if she’s okay,
is akin to the distance between
you two,
which seems unbearably vast. Yet, earth and sky are actually
Just a leap/faith/jump away.
Her arms could be a ripcord;
I could be the one holding the welcome sign,
When she lands in another place–
Wherever the belly
And the wings
And the humming takes her.
I could be there.