thoughts to regret

 every word is a regrettable one. 

day turns to night and you've missed the anniversary of your brother's death. 

your chosen mother bites back her disappointment, the unspoken begging for life in her words. 

"don't worry about it. you made me a mother. that's all i can expect.."

every word is full of unspoken expectations.
of all the people who best the odds, she wishes that i had been him. 

she knows as well as i do that he was stronger than i am. she knows that i'm not made of the same stuff - like her family says, i'm adopted. how could i be hers?

i didn't make her a mother. 

i made her a mother like any word can be a verb; as if no one had ever made it an action word before you did. i came into the world kicking and screaming for something i didn't know i had. forever loud, insatiable, and full of questions - asking was my calling card. i'd ask the same questions over and over, as if the answer would change in a ten-second vacuum. 

"why did you want this?"
"why did you choose me?"
"why didn't you pick someone else?"

i ask if she regrets me, not really wanting the answer. i ask if she would rather do without me, not really ready to hear the truth. i think that's a running theme; as if maybe i'm only here for a motif. (it's true. a $95,000 motif, full of the most hollow words ever conceptualized.)

and this makes me good at what?

shadowing my brother. 

the only living follow-up is the wrong child. i don't know what that deity needed with my sibling, but they didn't leave enough of him behind to guide any of us. they didn't leave me anything to follow up on. no breadcrumbs, no clues; no hint besides the bitter remembrance of our mother. i want to be someone other than a marked replacement. words only go so far, even if flowers bloom in every syllable.

she used her genes and my father's to create him, a perfect hybrid of my saviors. he would have been the perfect mix of my mother's raven italian beauty and my father's slender, pointed irish luck. in one timeline, he would have had nanny's nose, grandma's red hair, and a deep appreciation for corporate finance. in another, he has a rathbun nose and he never once shook a stick at our family name. his middle name would have been mather like every first born son before him, but maybe it didn't hold the same weight. 

which timeline is the one where any of this matters at all?

i was built from broken strands of DNA, every piece a fractured mistake. i was raised in the spotlight, all while never holding a candle to the ones before me. one year to the day you died, and i will never be the person she planned for. i am the line in southern courthouse, my parents holding their breath as the judge says what they've paid to guarantee: that i am there, and they are mine. that who i would have been could never compare to the person they were allowing me to be. 

i'm simply the one she was left with, like that will ever account for you.

i used to wonder if she let herself dwell on the fact that i wasn't made of her; if she was aware that she had paid handsomely in advance for a lifetime of pain.

my birth parents never got married, so maybe it's only right that neither will i.

i wasn't the one who finished us out strong, and even if i was, who gives a shit? i'm not the baby. and i'm certainly not lawrence. i lived at nanny's while they vanished into an airport terminal to adopt my little brother, and i was supposed to understand that. it wasn't that i wasn't enough, it was that if genes had a say, i would have been one of five. i would have been guided by god. the Catholics would love me because i would have been god's plan for a couple in pain, and a child's purpose peaks at that.

had things been different, i wouldn't be where i am today.

i would have fulfilled my mission and been done with the whole affair. i wouldn't have been stuck in the eternal limbo of being Chosen, only to fall short. 

i'm so angry. i'm so tired. when will it feel right?