I think I was lost,
The moment I laid eyes on you.
How very embarrassing.
I even,
For a time,
Tried to sing like you, Talk like you,
Imitated your slight french accent.
For six years, I watched you-
Not like a creeper.
Ok,
Probably like an utter creeper.
I didn't just watch, though,
We did converse. Many times,
Through the years.
Those exchanges mainly served to emphasise
Your other-ness, to show to me
That manic pixie dream-girl quality of yours,
Those hyper-widened large blue eyes,
Which seemed always a mask, but perhaps,
You were just that much the woodland creature.
The Luna to my Hermione,
Or the Persephone to my Hades...?
I carried hope, once.
Completely unfounded, mind,
But in quiet moments,
As I looked at you, like Peter Pan at Mrs Darling,
I thought I glimpsed a kiss in the corner of your mouth,
And was that my name on it?
Perhaps I am foolish still-
Picking over past interactions, for a thread-
To pull on, that might lead me-
To some hidden aspect of you, which may,
Or may not exist.
But you still go around like there's something missing from your life,
And sometimes,
I think of those old impressions, and for a moment I fancy-
It might be me.

Life is a constant act of forfeiture.
We each begin as a singularity,
A concentration of pure potential,
In that moment, truly equal.

An instant later, the timer starts,
The years of our lives begin to drain away,
And thereafter we can know only the effects of our own clocks, and others', trickling sand across the sepulchre.

For me, this has long been the truth of all things.

Except you.

You came after me,
And so,
Years after my hourglass was turned over,
The trend was reversed.

You did not give me immortality,
That would be ridiculous.
The gift you gave me was far more simple and pure.

For every moment you were on this earth,
The hourglass meant nothing to me.

Every moment spent, was one spent watching you grow,
Learn,
Live.

Every child watches their parents age, unto infirmity,
Unto death.

For some parents, I know,
To watch a child grow into adulthood is to be reminded of their own aging, and encroaching mortality.

A sibling has a unique perspective.

I was not so much older than you as to feel old while watching you grow.

I was not close enough in age to you,
As to feel as though we were the same kind of creature.

A child's memory is a cloth which quickly frays and fades in colour;
As you grew and learnt, I did not remember my own passage through those stages,
And so all of your stages were new to me.

As I matured, I came to recognise what this meant to me.
I became engrossed in the observation of your life.

I discovered, with joy, that you were destined to outstrip me in every way.
Taller, stronger, smarter, more beautiful, more eloquent, more kind, and intrinsically good.

You put your grains of sand to better use than I did mine.
With every passing day, you gained strength.

And then, it was over.

And I realised that part of it had been an illusion.

You were real, of course.

None of what you were was diminished by this realisation.
If anything,
It only made you more valiant in my eyes.

Because you had been taken in, too.

The illusion was this:
As each of our lives is an hourglass on a table,
Yours and mine standing side by side,
Each appeared to hold about the same amount of sand.

It was a very convincing lie.

You lived your life as I have lived mine,
Making plans decades ahead,
Looking forward to a career, love, offspring,
Even so far as retirement.

The day you died, the truth was revealed;
That even at the instant you passed,
The lower hollow of my hourglass held more sand,
Than any part of yours ever would.

And that was the cruellest truth, for you.

The younger sibling spends all of their life,
Catching up to the elder.

Reaching every milestone in their wake.

The day you were born, I was two years and nine months ahead of you.

And you would never catch up.

A yellow pill, and then into
The tender hold of Morpheus,
Surrendered to the warm embrace
Of things seen and unseen.

Under white sheets, and then amongst
The harlequins and Freudians,
The rampancy and innocence
Of false narcotic dreams.

Amongst the sailors at the dock,
Or naked in the thoroughfare,
Gathering to watch the lions
Stalk adjoining streets.

To speak in tongues, and find it well,
To call a rabbit 'Marchioness',
To draw a sword against the fray
Of marauding balloons.

Vanity but tossed aside,
A ghost with no reflected face
Walks through a foreign city
Where the streets do not have names.

In Port-Au-Prince that never was,
Truth wears a past love as a mask,
And speaks in riddles, strumming softly
On an old guitar.

One last caress, the god retreats,
Warm sun peeks through the lush blue curtains,
Subject wakes alone, the potion
Sifting through her veins.

Without you,
I would rather be a candle than a nova.
You were a light to put paid to all darkness.
You were a jewel which eclipsed the lustre of diamonds.
I will not attempt to imitate your light,
For by definition such an imitation would be feeble.
Indeed, had we not been so close, any such attempt,
Would be more a mockery than anything else.
To live with any pale shadow of your light would be,
For me,
The purest agony.
And so,
I shall sit in the dark and flicker,
Shudder at the eldritch shadows
My own inconstant light throws up around me,
And then some day I shall gutter,
And no-one shall ever know that there was once light,
In our little patch of darkness.
And all shall be again as it once was.

I turned to you one day and said,
"I am alone, for true"
At that you rather looked perplexed, and said,
"I'm here with you"
But truth be told, and given due,
As I am so inclined,
That statement did but nothing,
To ease my troubled mind.
For though you sit beside me,
Sure as the tree stands on the hill;
As flowers die before the winter,
You won't forever sit there still.
As the seasons turn like cart-wheels,
And the sun bolts through the sky,
As 'cross the ever-changing firmament,
The blue green Earth will fly,
As wars are started, ended,
As the future comes around,
We'll spend our time together,
As he seeps into the ground.
And some day, decades beyond us,
As I sit here and look about,
There will be no-one left beside me,
For your time will have run out.
And so that is why, on borrowed time,
I made to turn to you,
And told your fleeting spectre that,
"I am alone, for true".