When you were ten, you filled the room with laughter
A smile like yours, adorned with the crooked teeth of youth
Brought ease when all around was thunder,
To an ever-growing garden of those who loved you
 
Your presence was as relished as rain during a drought
Until the ground where you stood bred disease
Sprouting prickly vines that tangled around your skull
Until you no longer rose with the sun
 
And the dry earth cracked. Dirt piled beneath my fingernails.
finding blades of grass to pluck
from my preschool garden was the
extent of my struggle as a toddler
 
Yet the air at home grew tense
With the tears of our mother
Dripping down the storm drain
Where you stood, drenched in your own pee
 
Cancer struck before your first growth spurt could.
You were always skinny, like the stem of a sunflower
Whose face is towards the sun no matter rain or shine
Yet now the words thin and frail would reflect you better
 
The seeds of your youth –  what would’ve been
Were crushed by the hands of doctors who shoved forth countless
bottles of pills you swallowed like the lunch you would throw up
You were the one in a million.
 
Your once lively laughter evaporated in the heat of chemo
You never asked for, sinking deeper into the hospital bed
Where stark cotton spreads replaced your colorful Pokémon sheets.
Sterile silver instruments were more familiar than the cello you once played.
 
The later months of your battle
Are cloudy to the memory of my own youth,
As I, too ignorant to know why my brother limped
When he once ran, retained only the skeleton of your trauma
 
All I remember is
After the long winter you undertook,
The flowers began to bloom where your hair had fallen.
Where a single rain cloud drowned you, the sky cleared.
 
You survived.

III.
I fear fate in how it treated you.
From the grasp of cancer, you left gasping for air, yet the pills still
Shoved their way down your throat – a token of your burden:
Recovering from where you had fallen.
 
Where the ground had cracked in your youth
You could not take root again.
You had to start anew, to regrow your petals
While a garden of strangers basked
 
Instead of returning to middle school
Where your past friends had grown up without you
A tutor would visit our home to teach you all you had missed
While you grasped for the person you once were
 
Your memory never fully returned
You could ramble on about Stacy from first grade
Yet forgot what our mother’s birthday was
A minute after she reminded you
 
Even now that you’ve graduated high school,
You act younger than me
You’re the one whose hand gets held when crossing the street
Who gets stared at by strangers who can only see the surface of who you are
 
You’re the bird who may never leave the nest
As your wings, weak and tattered
Limit you to the tree of your youth
To rely on your roots to live
 
Yet you retain this positivity that inspires me.
No matter what fate throws from the sky
You always face the sun, your chin up and tongue out
To taste the flurries before the blizzard.
 
Through it all, no matter how the rain pounds on
our doorstep with the next challenge of fate,
beckoning your strength and ours,
No matter if I haven’t always felt this way
 
I’m proud to be your little sister.