At fourteen my older sister and I barricade the bathroom door with our bodies.

Our mother is on the other side.

I am a fervid pulsating mass, my sister, my Aegis, my voice of reason,

tells me to hold my breath and count to thirty.

At nineteen, I fall into obsessive desire

for a boy who told me that he was scared that I wouldn’t want to be with him

when I figured out how to be happy.

When I told my sister she told me it was one of those things

everyone thinks but knows not to say.

When the boy broke up with me in my basement

and cried in my bed after, I forgave him.

When the same boy broke up with me again on the side of a highway

it was my friend who picked me up in her mothers beaten down SUV.

When I called my sister she told me it was just one of those things

that happens in these types of relationships.

When the same boy confessed to fucking someone else

I didn’t sleep for three days.

Every word I tried to speak I chewed

and swallowed.

When I called my sister on the other side of the world and coughed up the confession,

she told me that forgiveness is a gift that I was good at giving.

Last week I ask my sister about trying therapy,

tightrope the line of mother and her sister,

My sister’s no includes time and the scarcity of hers,

how getting to know someone enough to trust them takes too much.

I don’t blame my sister for my mother’s teachings.

It’s known that people can hold their breath underwater

for three minutes before dying

my sister and I are a testament that we can do it for longer.