That night, I stood in the dark, tangled in my clothes, fingers trembling against buttons I couldn’t undo. I gave up and fell onto the bed half-dressed. I couldn’t sleep. I kept replaying what I had heard a few hours earlier.
Earlier that evening, I pestered my boyfriend to tell me what my sister had texted him after he pulled the phone from my hand too quickly. She had gone to a therapist. The therapist told her she needed to set boundaries with me, that she was only two years older, and that she didn’t have to be responsible for me.
Even with a sister I sometimes call my mother, I felt suddenly like an orphan.
When a parent dies, love reorganizes itself around whoever remains. For us, it meant each other.
If she drew a boundary, I didn’t know where all that love would go. I had grown up believing love worked differently. My father loved extravagantly. He called constantly, brought gifts I hadn’t asked for, loudly despised anyone who troubled me at school, and spoke about us as if we were the brightest stars of his world. His flaws—his drinking, the disappointments that followed him from his own family—felt distant to me. I thought love was supposed to be overwhelming, yet certain, something that never ran out or left you questioning it.
I drowned in guilt, first for prying, then for the expectations and neediness that followed. Beneath that guilt was something sharper: betrayal.
My sister and I share everything. It became vital, especially after our mother fell ill and not long after our father died. Through it, we bound ourselves together, not just to fill the empty spaces grief had opened in us, but to notice things about each other we might otherwise have grown numb to.
Growing up, she had her small secrets, nothing damaging, just things she kept to herself. I didn’t. I gave her everything.
I began to wonder if that was pride, this insistence on honesty. On being the one who shares more. Was it any different from claiming moral superiority? And if I let go of that identity, what would remain? Showing up each day with my wounds uncovered had become the only way I knew how to be good.
Back home, I watched her for signs. Would she speak differently? Hesitate before answering? Nothing changed.
But beneath it all were questions I couldn’t ask: Was I no longer wanted? Was I becoming too much? Was I a burden handed over by our dying mother?
***
While she sat outside the clinic during my ultrasound appointment, keeping her promise to always accompany me, even for something minor, I imagined her somewhere in the mountains on a solo trip. She finds a strange fruit, peels it, takes a bite. It tastes like a roasted chestnut, she once told me after a trip.
She hasn’t taken a trip alone since our mother’s cancer returned. The last time, our mother insisted she go, promising she would be fine. She meticulously arranged everything from medicines to reports and instructions for me, reluctant until the last minute.
At the clinic, I wondered if I should have come alone. I wondered if, instead of honoring promises, I was trapping her in them. I kept waiting for the moment she would decide this was too inconvenient, not what she signed up for.
Would she eventually grow tired of this? Maybe she already was. I was exhausted too.
Maybe what binds me to her is not need alone, but a rusted, painful memory, impossible to put down.
***
She has been married for over two years now, and I keep asking her for advance notice if she decides to plan for a child. I tell her that she already has one child to take care of, so why would she want another? I say it lightly, as if I am teasing. What I actually mean is: where would I stand if she had someone else to love more? She tells me I will adore the child, that I will pamper her the way our father once pampered me. She says we are not like other siblings who grow apart when their family and responsibilities expand. She says it with certainty. I want to believe her, desperately, pathetically. But I don’t, not yet.
A child takes over. It happened to our mother. We became her world; her sisters receded into the background. I bring it up again and again, needing to hear the same assurances that continue to feel untrue. Once, cruelly, I told her I wouldn’t marry or have children if she strongly disapproved, knowing even as I said it that it wasn’t right for me to ask this of her. Isn’t it easy to renounce things that don’t feel meant for you anyway?
She says she has the right to want a life of her own. Sometimes I hear the therapist in her voice. Sometimes I hear someone simply growing.
And despite the panic it stirs in me, I feel proud of her for standing firm.
***
When we fight, she goes quiet. Her lip quivers, but she says nothing. She retreats into her room and sleeps. I do the opposite. I pace. I replay every word. I dig into my skin, grip the edges of objects around me as if bracing for impact. I need resolution immediately. She needs distance. I resent her for disappearing, though I’ve come to understand it’s her way of surviving the storm. I unravel first. She waits for it to pass.
But one time recently, she didn’t retreat. She met me in it. She brought up things that were true, but not right for that moment, when I was already breaking down. She pointed out my tone when I was just screaming to be seen, to be understood. She chose words that could really wound, something I used to do in arguments with people I loved, something I’m not proud of.
We had been arguing because I kept asking her for something she had forgotten more than once. She seemed tired of hearing about it, tired of the reminders.
“It’s not your house,” she said, holding the door so I couldn’t slam it shut.
My whole body felt stretched to its limit. I stood there, unable to move. I met her gaze. She didn’t look away. I felt denied a space of my own. I had nowhere to run.
Suddenly, I was reminded of how I used to argue with our mother—refusing to budge, calling out her tone instead of trying to understand her exhaustion. I saw my own ugliness reflected back at me.
Later, I would realize the doorframe was already loose, the neighbors close enough to hear everything. But in that moment, the words landed differently: a reminder that the room was not really mine.
***
After that, something in me shifted and doubt settled in. Was I too much for her now? Was she exhausted in ways she wouldn’t say? The thought of her pulling away, even for rightful reasons, even temporarily, unsettled me.
After our parents died, I mistook isolation for healing. I stayed inside more than I used to, turned down invitations, told myself I needed quiet to process everything. What I didn’t notice then was that the circle kept shrinking until even my sister was standing just outside it.
I began watching her differently, as if I needed to prepare for something I couldn’t yet name.
When she reads my stories, I sometimes see her eyes dart, as if she’s trying to locate herself in the version of the older sister I’m describing. Once, she asked, “Did that really happen?” When I told her no, that we never went there, that it was entirely fictional, she nodded with visible relief.
She hates when she cannot remember the details the way I do. And maybe I sound boastful when I insist on details—dates, phrases, places—as if I’m proving something. As if I’m not trying to hide the loneliness of being the only keeper of certain memories. As if I’m not afraid that if I don’t hold them, no one will. I have always believed that if I hold the memory tightly enough, the love cannot disappear.
I tell myself she is better at letting go. Content with what remains. Or maybe her memories are simply stored differently, locked in a box whose key is misplaced, while I clutch the bent paperclip that once held them together.
What I don’t tell her is that even when the story is fictional, it comes from somewhere real. That sometimes the younger sister I write has words I swallowed years ago. They burned going down, and I don’t regret giving them a voice.
And what she doesn’t tell me (I suspect) is how terrifying it must feel to stand in a space where the older sister cannot fix what aches in the younger one.
***
When our mother was going through treatment, I remember her asking my sister, “I am such a burden. Are you mad at me?” Her voice carried fear and dread at what she could no longer do for my sister. My sister smiled and said, “Never. I could never be mad at you.”
Outside the ICU once, when we knew what was coming but refused to say it out loud, she told me she would take care of her no matter what. “Even if she’s only there as a shadow,” she said. “She doesn’t have to be whole.”
Sometimes I hear that same question rising in me. Is there more that I should be doing to deserve her love? I find it difficult to believe that my mere presence is sufficient.
For me, love is never just love. It is also fear. Not fear of death or collapse, but of exhaustion, of wearing her down, of rehearsing catastrophe until it begins to feel inevitable.
***
I keep telling myself that if I can just figure out what comes after the collapse of our story, our relationship, our home, then I’ll be prepared. I try to imagine the person I would become after that destruction, regardless of how it happens.
I don’t know any other way love could exist. Losing her would be total. I try to imagine reinventing everything—how I’d walk, how I’d dress, the places I’d go, the life I’d construct from scratch. Someone unrecognizable even to me.
But it always ends the same way: denial.
I refuse that version of reality. And strangely, that refusal feels like relief.
When I ask her, “Do you ever think about me dying?”
Without hesitation, she says, “I won’t die before you. Don’t worry.”
As if she had misheard me. But she hadn’t. That was exactly what I wanted to hear.
***
I read constantly, but I still want to be told a story at bedtime like a child. My sister has never told me a story she made up.
“I can’t just invent things like you,” she says. No matter how much I insist, asking her to twist a movie plot or make the villain kind, she refuses.
It frustrates me more than it should. It isn’t a grand request. I only want what I once had: nights when our mother stayed awake while I couldn’t sleep, spinning fairy tales. When she ran out of ideas, she would offer one line and let me continue the rest.
I know I am asking my sister for more than a story. I am asking her to step into a role that isn’t hers. To let her image blur with our mother’s, so I don’t have to look directly at the space she left.
Instead, she picks up a children’s book and reads from the page where the story is already decided.
I miss the time when I didn’t analyze love. When I wrote stories where neither my mother nor my sister were characters that could leave, they were permanent by being outside the plot.
***
One early morning, she came into my room and stood over me to see if I was awake. I had fallen asleep barely an hour before. I felt her presence but kept my eyes closed, assuming she had come to wake me for something trivial. She left without saying anything.
Later, she told me about the dream.
She was being chased by someone ruthless. Someone tried to help her, but she refused because the man chasing her had seen it, too, and helping her would put the helper in danger. She described a bridge that barely held, stretching endlessly as she ran. Her chest rose rapidly as she spoke, her eyes fixed somewhere behind me, as if she were still trapped inside it.
As she described this endless bridge, I realized she carries fear, too, just differently. I have always assumed I am the fragile one.
We’ve both had dreams where we scream, and no sound comes out. But this, she said, was worse.
I once read that when a woman dreams she is being chased, the question is not only what is chasing her, but what part of herself she might be running from—some neglected instinct, anger, or grief demanding attention. The chase continues, the writer said, until the dreamer turns and faces it.
It is difficult, though, to see the pursuer as a messenger rather than an enemy. And it is equally difficult to acknowledge truths or desires when you do not yet know them for what they are.
I do not know whether her dream meant the same thing. Perhaps this time, the man was not a messenger at all, but simply dangerous.
“When your voice is gone, at least you know the words are still there,” she said. “Here, there was no hope. No way out. No matter how fast I ran.”
The fear lingered in her all day.
“I fear fear the most,” she told me.
I wanted to comfort her, to say the right thing, but I felt useless. And in that helplessness, I understood something I had never seen before. Maybe this is what she feels when she watches me unravel.
I wanted her to shake me awake that morning. To demand my attention. To need me the way I always needed her. Before everything we endured, I used to do that without hesitation. And I desperately want to be able to do it again.
***
Then, one day, she told me, “Therapists aren’t supposed to tell you what to do. They’re only supposed to help you understand your feelings and make your own decisions.” She didn’t mention that day directly, but I knew what she meant.
And sometimes, when she says we are not like other siblings, she says it with pride. I believe her. It feels extraordinary to accept that she can set boundaries and still want the kind of closeness we’ve always had.
On our recent trip to Turkey, we found a trail along a canyon, blue water glinting between pebbles and stone. White egrets gathered near the stream, lifting their beaks and clacking sharply when we came too close. A black cat padded ahead of us, brushing against our legs as if guiding the way.
There was no one else in sight. The whole place felt like ours.
She spotted a bridge ahead and studied the narrow trail climbing between rocks and trees toward it, calculating the distance and announcing it would take no more than ten minutes.
This time, I followed. I told her that if anything was slippery, I could steady her. Months of getting stronger had given me that confidence. For once, I could protect her.
When we reached the bridge, she stepped onto it first anyway. It was wide and sturdy, with chains for railings. She took in the view, made sure it would hold both our weight, then turned and asked me to come.
We stood there alone, shouting each other’s names into the open air. No echo came back. We laughed at that. I did a ridiculous dance; she followed. We didn’t compare it to anywhere else. We didn’t say we wished our mother were there. We didn’t take posed photographs to prove it had happened.
We just stood in it.
When we walked back and reached the exit, the rain began.
I still don’t know what love looks like without fear stitched into it. I don’t know where grief ends and attachment begins. But I see a way forward where sometimes my grief can lift like mist, and I can simply be in the presence of her love.
On that bridge, I wasn’t trying to secure her. I wasn’t measuring distance or anticipating rain. I wasn’t rehearsing collapse.
I was simply beside her. For now, that is enough.
About the Author:
Garima Chhikara is a writer from Bangalore, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Forge Literary Magazine, Hypertext Magazine, Hobart, Cherry Tree, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find her at garimachhikara.com.
Photo by Dasha Yukhymyuk on Unsplash