At least you're resting easy...

At least you’re resting easy.

At least you’re resting while I stay afloat by wrestling all the selfish voices suggesting that being your sister wasn’t enough. I have to work harder at accepting that while I was family, I wasn’t the only one you loved. That all these people around me were also family, so for all of us this is equally distressing apparently.

But at least you’re resting peacefully.

At least you’re resting while I convince myself that this mob of mourners is really a blessing. I keep stressing over claiming my stake, but that cannot mean rejecting those who also find today just as depressing. Because while I am the little sister in the room across the hall, this is the family you chose back in your adolescence. The family you found in classrooms and in corner offices, the family you felt comfortable sharing confessions, the family who you kept to yourself instead of insisting on meshing. The family I meet today and they tell me stories I used to find refreshing but suddenly find myself getting protective.

At least you’re resting peacefully.

At least you’re resting while more people step out from shadows and insist they feel your essence when I haven’t felt you in so long, it’s getting overwhelming. The people who are assessing your loss as a social movement rather than a trauma that is suffocating. Those that take their time rolling their tongues around your name, gently caressing it with care, only to spit it out hastily at their convenience, reaping in the benefits of your inability to break the silence. The vultures that are professing their love in all the right spaces but slapping a tape on their faces when it comes to addressing a call for changes. All those that I must smile at while repressing my own feelings of skepticism as I watch an army of people mourning whenever fitting, and then just as easily retreating. I think about how little of you there is left anyway, and how I’ve spent the last too long obsessing over and fleshing out the little piece of you left with me while the rest of you is carelessly tossed around like a game of passing the parcel – claiming they’re suffering as I see them picking and choosing and benefitting from a dialogue that has sent me spiraling.

But at least you’re resting easy.