Alana.

Mi hermanita hermosa, te extraño con una profundidad solo encontrada en el núcleo de mi corazón, la raíz de mi alma. During nights like these, when a light rain patters against my cheeks, a cool breeze tickling my flesh, I think of you. I think of days spent at the lakefront, hanging our feet from the edge of a stone-bed with hopes the waves would crash just high enough to wet our toes, kiss our ankles. I think of rolled ice cream and the gobs of chocolate you somehow managed to transfer from the spoon to your chin. I think of Pitch Perfect 3 and dark theaters and prequel synopses in the form of not so soft whispers.

I wasn’t sure what you meant to me the day you were born. Or the month after, even the year. I was thirteen and, honestly, convinced I wouldn’t be alive much longer. That’s the truth. You don’t yet know about the things I’ve gone through seen or done. I try my best to keep them from you, shoving the cork so deep into the bottle you’d have to shatter it to release its contents. No, you don’t need to know. Not yet. You deserve to live, to run around a park aimlessly, your only concern being the sustainability of your breath, your flow of oxygen. Where you’ll gather it, how. You propel oxygen through my lungs, which conflate like balloons, sending me soaring through our fragile atmospheres.

My fragile atmospheres.

You’d never believe it, but you’re the first person to make me feel beautiful. Like a human. All my life I’ve been told I’m too skinny, too quiet to be trusted, that I have el pelo malo, that I’m not dark enough to be black, light enough to be a real Puerto Rican. But I’ve always been good enough to be your brother. To you, my hair isn’t a question but an answer, a declaration: curly, frizzy, beautiful. I remember one night, five years ago, when you entered the living room with a shitty little metal comb that was made for dolls with razor straight hair, thin as my confidence. You wanted to comb my hair. That won’t work on me, I said. But you insisted and ran it through anyway, reviving the fro I’d hidden for years with number 2 fades and excessive amounts of keratin gel.

See, you said, now you look pretty.

My hair’s never been pretty.

I think it is, you said as you played with the curls springing from the back of my neck. That’s when I knew I’d been gifted a gem in the form of you.

Ruby.

About a month ago, when Gurshran and I were visiting for a weekend, you asked why I didn’t smile more. Gurshran smiles a lot, you said, I think she loves me more than you do…

Those words broke my heart, shattered it into many tiny fragments. My eyes well at the notion that it may be true, that I may lead a life sans love for you. Moments like those encapsulate the depth of my insecurities. Those which prevent me from truly bonding with you. Around you I rarely showcase anger or discontentment, because I’m afraid to be the malicious men of our childhoods. During our walks to Baskin’ Robbins or Roeser’s for ice cream, I commit 40% of my attention to you and 60% to the outside world, the hood, my predetermined graveyard. A car might turn the corner too quickly, a hand might reach too close, a strap might dodge my peripherals and launch a bullet in our direction. I was raised on hyper-caution and anxiety. Anytime your hand leaves mine and you linger behind my mind unwinds into the chasm gifted me by my mother over time.

You’re always asking why I leave so often. Why I have to study in different cities states and countries. Why I prefer distance over proximity. I say that I need to for school, that the internships are for my future career, that seeing other countries allows me to understand ours better, us better. This is all true but, for years, I just wanted to escape. I wanted to run until my breath ran out, until my lungs collapsed, until my heart plunged into my stomach and disintegrated in its acids. I wanted to see if someone would attempt to revive me. I wanted to know if anyone cared. I never once considered that you might; the thought never entered my mind. Not until I went to Iowa and realized that resuscitation is self-induced. An unwilling person can never be revived. While my person had died, my spirit had begun anew, birthed from the embers you stoke in the pits of my heart.

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Processed with VSCO with c1 preset

If you were to ask me now, I’d tell you what I tell your mother and Gurshran constantly: I do this for you, so that you can experience a world much grander, much lovelier than I ever knew or will know. I travel the world with hopes that the rapid palpitations of my heart, a byproduct of all the wonderful sights sounds and smells, will thrust you into a fervor, the rhythm exciting your body and mind like a swift bachata. I scream and cry and laugh and smile and run and leap so that your ladder may have an additional rung, support.

I hate being away from you as much as you hate my being gone. I do. My longing for your presence often leads me to tears. It’s leading me there now. Not being by your side, conversing with you about hockey and drawing and bullies and movies and boring math assignments pains me. Calling you once every week or every other week isn’t enough. But I know that you know my love is true.

I know you don’t actually believe that I don’t love you, or that my girlfriend holds a greater love and appreciation for you than I do. I know, but my heart doesn’t. And I hate it because it’s you who fills my heart with life. That’s why I’ll protect you over anyone or anything, why I’ll forever enclose the embers of my soul in the cache of my aorta. So if ever you find yourself in doubt, peer closely at the tears of my heart and see that they bleed ruby-red for you.

Santiago.

My ex girlfriend once called you my half-sister and I nearly ended the relationship. That decision might seem rash but, as my logic went at the time, if she couldn’t understand the profoundness of my love for you and how it extended beyond a simple lineal connection, then she couldn’t quite understand me.

I don’t quite understand me or how I can be deserving of someone so precious as you. Luck is the only explanation: we both happened to share the same father and so happened to bond as a result of that same father’s absence. His role in our relationship sickens me.

My one wish for you as a child and throughout your entire life has been that you don’t suffer in the same way that I have. Our father occupied one of those avenues for me. He was less a father and more an enigma, a ghost, an apparition that appeared periodically but tactfully exited before anyone could notice. You’ll always have a stronger connection to him than I will and, in some ways, I envy you for that; for others, I don’t. You’ll always remember the cool father who made milkshakes and pizzas and popped in a Red-box for movie nights–marathons of Studio Gibli and Star Trek and Transformers–the father who smiled when you giggled and frowned when you sobbed. You’ll always remember the Disney World’s and Happy Meals and Barnum and Bailey’s. But you’ll also remember that, after 7 years, he left.

He left. He left you and I’ll never forgive him for it. There were moments in my life when I thought I could forgive him for leaving me Frankie Miguel Scarlett Nico Malik and Apple behind, moments when I believed that he was genuinely working toward the betterment of our relationship. But, like him, those moments came few and far between. Even still, I never found myself to hate him; not until he left you.

People will come and go from your life with the frequency of traffic on the Dan Ryan. I’ve learned it’s inevitable. But, Alana Ruby Santiago, ember of my soul, gem of my heart don’t you ever convince yourself that you’re not worthy of love appreciation adoration or commitment. Alana Ruby Santiago, don’t ever entertain the thought, the fear that I may leave and never return. Alana Ruby Santiago, remember that no matter how far the distance between us may seem, I’m always near, in the nest of your heart and you in mine. Te amo tremendamente, mi hermanita hermosa.