Visa to Visit

My sisters taught me what I was before I had the language to introduce myself. They named me little one and come here and don’t tell Mama, and somehow all three became the same word. I grew up in the house next to theirs, meaning I grew up always looking through a window, watching women who shared my blood build a country I had a visa to visit but never quite the right shoes for.

They taught me tenderness the way you learn a second language: by embarrassing yourself in it first, by mispronouncing love until it sounds like something close enough, by understanding that are you eating is the same sentence as I miss you in every dialect our family ever spoke.

I used to think being the little brother meant being the footnote, but I have learned that footnotes are where the real story hides, the detail the main text was too proud to say out loud. And we still don’t live in the same city, never have, which means my whole relationship with my sisters is a long-distance phone call that started before either of us had a phone.

I think about my oldest sister standing at the edge of a conversation last Thanksgiving, laughing at something I said, and the laugh was with me this time, for the first time, like I had finally grown tall enough for her to see my face without looking down, and I didn’t say anything, just held it the way you cup water in both hands knowing you’re already losing it and drinking anyway.