I reached in and worked it loose and brought it out into the light, and I sat down on her bed, because it was a stack of letters, tied with a ribbon, and every one of them had my name on the front, in my twin sister handwriting, and not a single one had ever been sent.
There were dozens of them. And the first one I opened was dated five years ago, near exactly when she first started to pull away from me, and by the time I finished reading it I understood the whole thing, the distance, the holding back, the way she would look off across the table like there was something she could not say. There was something she could not say. She was dying, and she had known it for five years, and she had never once told me.
She had gotten a diagnosis, the bad kind, the slow kind, and the doctors had given her a long hard road with only the one ending. And my sister, my twin, the other half of me since before either of us was born, had made a choice I am still trying to forgive her for and understand at the very same time. She decided not to tell me. She decided to pull back instead, to go a little distant, to spare me five years of watching her die by inches, of grieving her while she was still sitting right in front of me. She chose to let me think she had just gotten cool and busy, because she would rather I lost her a little at a time and never knew why, than have me suffer every single step of it alongside her.
And instead of telling me, she wrote to me. A letter every few months, all the things she could not say to my face, sealed up and hidden away for me to find after, so that I would get it all at once, at the end, when the sparing of me was finally done.
I know you think I pulled away, and I am sorry for the hurt of it. But I could not make you watch this, sister. I could not take your last five happy years and fill them up with my dying. So I am giving you the truth in here instead, all at once, where it cannot steal any more days than it has to. Do not be angry with me. I loved you too much to make you grieve me twice.
I sat on my dead twin bed and read every letter, five years of my sister loving me from behind a wall she had built on purpose to protect me, and I did not know whether to sob or to be furious or to be more grateful than I have ever been in my life, so I did all three at once, the way you do.
She got it wrong, I think. I would have wanted those five years, hard as every day of them would have been. But she got it wrong out of a love so big that she was willing to let me believe she had stopped caring, rather than let my last years with her be nothing but grief. That was my sister. That was the whole truth of the distance the entire time. She did not pull away from me. She threw herself in front of the worst of it, so that it would hit her and not me. She was always the brave one of us two. I just never knew how brave until I opened that drawer.