How Much I Hate My Sister

There is a secret I silence every morning,

a thread I pull tight, like a ribbon knotted too many times,

the kind that frays when no one is looking,

and I whisper it, not to be heard but to stop it from eating my throat.

I genuinely hate her.

Not in the way people roll their eyes and toss the word like confetti,

but in the way rain hates roofs,

in the way a wound remembers every finger that pressed into it too hard.

She was the storm at every birthday,

the smirk behind my punishments,

the weight I carried while she floated,

careless as lint in the corners of our mother’s worry.

And still she asks for more.

Still she calls them ungrateful,

forgets the times they held her up with bones borrowed from their own tired spines,

while I stood in the shadows and clapped quietly so they wouldn't notice how my hands shook with rage.

I dream sometimes of revealing it all,

screaming into the wallpaper until it peels away from the lies we grew up pretending were love.

But I don’t.

Because guilt is a whisper with claws,

and family is the cage you decorate with duty and denial.

So I carry this hatred like a bruised fruit in my chest,

soft and rotting,

and no one asks why I flinch when she hugs me too long,

or why I never say her name unless I must.