Shadow Sibling

I always wanted a sibling. Someone to play hide and seek with, someone to ask the questions I couldn’t ask adults. A protector. A confidant. A friend who would love me even when I was impossible to love.

But Mom never told me about him. Even when I asked. I found out from my aunts, my cousins- always in the sideways way that family secrets come out, half-whispered between sips of coffee or over a sink full of dishes.

“There was another before you, you know,” someone would say. “He only lived six hours. He was your brother.”

They told me his name like they were handing over contraband. Micheal.

There were no pictures. No birth certificate. No blanket tucked away in a cedar chest. Just a fact dropped into my lap and the silence that followed.

The first time I heard it, I didn’t even know how to feel. You can’t grieve for someone you never met, right? But grief doesn’t always need an introduction. It can bloom from absence as easily as loss.

I was a teenager when I learned the truth, and for some reason, it clicked into a place I didn’t know had been waiting for it. I wondered if this was why I’d always gravitated toward “being one of the guys,” why I felt more at ease in the easy camaraderie of boys than in the brittle competition of girls. Like maybe some part of me had been reaching for a connection I was supposed to have but never did.

After that, I started building him myself. I gave him my dark hair, my crooked smile. I made him taller than me, older, always running ahead on the playground but looking back to make sure I was close behind. I let him be the one who told me the truth when the adults wouldn’t. I gave him a laugh I could hear in the quiet.

I filled in his voice during the nights when the house was too still. I imagined him sitting cross-legged on the floor of our room, trading me the good half of the sandwich without asking. I pictured him stepping between me and every cruelty I didn’t yet know was coming.

When you grow up with a shadow sibling, they become whatever you need most at the moment you need it. Sometimes he was my safe place. Sometimes he was my excuse- an invisible ally I could point to when I didn’t want to stand alone. Sometimes he was just a warm weight at my back, the imagined certainty that someone was always on my side.

Years later, I learned the story in pieces. Complications at birth. His skull never hardened properly. My mother- still a child herself- left holding a body she’d barely gotten to know. And then… nothing. A box was closed somewhere, literally or figuratively, and she moved forward without him.

But I didn’t.

I carry him still- not the real Micheal, but the one I made from scraps and wishful thinking. The brother who could’ve been my protector, my witness. The one I never met but somehow still miss.

It feels silly, sometimes, being haunted by a ghost you can’t help but think you’ve made yourself. But I know he deserved a chance, and I can’t help but mourn his lack of it.