I want to say I don’t fantasize romantic notions. But I’m the queen of romantic notions. I play out situations that couldn’t even possibly exist. Nothing hurts more than the realization of things that could not possibly exist.

I think thats what hurts the most when I think about her, or the lack of her. Its the future. Not the here and now, but what won’t ever be.

I won’t ever see her get married. I won’t ever know her husband. I won’t ever see her house. I will never spend the night there. We’ll never have movie nights or parties there. I wont see her become this great artist. She was this great artist and I was always so jealous of it. I never understood how people could draw and create something so beautiful and so real. And she was just beginning. She was just on the start of something great. Who knows what would have happened next.

I won’t ever see her have children. I’ll never be someone’s aunt. I won’t babysit her kids. They won’t run into my arms. I won’t ever give them nicknames. I won’t ever braid their hair, or tell them bedtime stories. I won’t buy them really cool birthday presents. I’ll never have them confide in me secrets they are too scared to tell their parents.

We’re never going to have the time to get better. Some things just change with time. Some things just need time to change. We started out so rough. I was a wild kid, all flailing body parts and emotions. I felt epically misunderstood and desired too much attention. I was selfish and chaotic. I had this world inside of me, all of these thoughts and ideas. I couldn’t express them to anyone, I couldn’t make anyone understand. It frustrated me and I was always acting out. But she had a calm reserve about her. She was funny and could draw people in without scaring them away. She was always trying to reel me in and get me to be this sister she wanted. She had asked for me and I had let her down. But I would have gotten better over time. I’m sure of it. I would have found my way eventually. We had already started getting into a groove. Things were changing, I was changing.

We won’t ever be best friends. We’re not going to be those sisters who get old and get super close. My grandma and my aunt outlived both of their husbands, they actually married brothers. I always thought their relationship was so amazing. They always had each other. They even had sleepovers in their old age. These weekends where they would go shopping and go out to lunch. Maybe it was just the silly dreams of a teenager but I thought thats what would happen to us. We’d be old and we’d be best friends. Even though we didn’t grow up like that. Even though we spent years fighting. I think I would have finally grown up. That all that constant aggression and those bottled up emotions that emitted themselves like sparks, would have finally died down. I would have become that person she had dreamt about.

But that’s the downfall of dreams. Sometimes dreams happen. Sometimes you work hard and you can make the impossible possible. But some things will never happen. You could grab and claw and bleed and you could never change the road in front of you. Its like the dark seedy underbelly of dreams. Its what they never really tell you. They never tell you that some things just aren’t written. She was there, she existed. The life we had with her existed. But these things, all the things I thought I was going to have, weren’t ever a possibility. It was never written for us.

So i try not to get caught up in those things, even though its hard and I still do. I try to pretend they aren’t missing holes in my life. Because they were never really there. They could never be there. But maybe I could still claw, still grab, still fight, and still bleed. Try to become that that person she wanted. Maybe that’s still a possibility. Maybe that could still be written.