Blood fashioned of Air

I have always only wanted an older brother. Maybe that’s why I keep losing them like I lose everything else—I keep them tucked away too safe so that even the air that I breathe out doesn’t touch him and I lose him as he slips out while I forget the very safe place I kept him in. 

I keep losing older brothers. It sounds so stupid. That is all I’ve ever been looking for. But I think that is the thing with fashioning blood out of thin air—it is all maya, an illusion, and even if I am the best illusionist, I know my blood has been fashioned out of thin air and air gets corrupted and air can’t love like blood does. I’ve spent my life looking for brothers in people’s faces, searching for a glimmer of knowing that permeates the solid and the liquids, and I’ve spent my life kicking myself for doing this. A brother means unconditional love, right? Blind love, right? If I come crying into your lap, you will end up holding all my tears in the cusp of your hands, right? 

So why do I keep making brothers who love me like brothers would not? Who love me in flinches and poison spewing from their mouths? Maybe I am cursed to not know an older brother’s love like my maa lost hers. Maybe it is true that the universe gives you your mother‘s loss in return. I have spent all my life looking for a boy who could be a brother but all I’ve ended up finding are boys who cannot stop being boys. 

Maybe it is only that I want someone who can hold me as I fall apart under the eldest daughter’s burden, someone who holds me as I transform air into blood and the eldest daughter becomes part of the air she was fashioned from. Maybe I only want you because then I wouldn’t have to worry about my shattering glass as I fall apart onto the floor, I wouldn’t have to worry about the pieces that I lose as they roll away to the farthest corners. Maybe all I want is to really be a child once again all over. 

Maybe it is only love that I crave—the touch of being held as I sigh and fall, the glass dome that shatters as I shatter and still doesn’t let me get hurt. Maybe my craving for a brother is more craving a destruction so complete that I don’t have to pick myself up. Maybe all I want is to fall apart in front of someone and to not worry about where my skin leaves my muscles and my bones. 

Maybe all I’m looking for is the love of an abandoned child who was never really “abandoned” at all.