I Write Birthday Poems for My Dead Sister
Every year she gets one, and every year it gets harder to age her.
My sister turns thirty-four on Saturday, and she has been dead for nine years. I have not missed a birthday yet.
The ritual is always the same. Eleven at night, when the house has gone quiet and the dishwasher has finished its sighing. The kitchen table. One of those cheap vanilla candles from the grocery store, the kind Mira used to buy in threes because they were two dollars and she said expensive candles were a scam invented to embarrass poor people. Her mug, the chipped one with the cartoon fox on it, filled with the peppermint tea she drank and I have always hated. And a spiral notebook that now holds nine poems, one for every birthday she has had since she stopped having them.
She died on a Tuesday in March. An aneurysm, sudden and total, somewhere between her lunch break and a dentist appointment she had been dreading for weeks.
She was twenty-five.
The last thing she ever left me was a voicemail I still have: It's me. Obviously. Call me back, I have gossip that will change your life.
I never got the gossip... I think about that more than I should.
The first poem happened by accident. Her birthday came seven months after the funeral, and I could not sleep, and at some point after midnight I found myself at the kitchen table writing her a birthday card for a mailbox that did not exist. It rhymed. It was terrible. She would have read it out loud in a fake British accent and then taped it to her fridge anyway, because that was the kind of sister she was: merciless and loyal in the same breath.
I lit a candle because the overhead light felt wrong. I have lit one every year since.
Here is the part nobody warns you about.
The poems are not really about remembering her. They are about aging her.
Every year I have to invent the next version of Mira, the one the world never got. At twenty-six I gave her a promotion she would have complained about and secretly loved. At twenty-eight I gave her a disastrous haircut, because she was overdue for one. At thirty I planned her a wedding in fourteen lines, right down to the argument we would have had about whether I was allowed to cry during my toast.
For a while, this was easy. I knew her so well that projecting her forward a year felt like simple math.
Then I turned thirty-one, and something quietly horrifying happened: I passed her.
I became older than my older-spirited little sister would ever be.
The math stopped being simple.
What does Mira look like at thirty-four? Does she still eat cereal for dinner? Has she softened about our mother, the way people do in their thirties, or is she still keeping score? I am no longer remembering a person. I am writing a character, and every year the character drifts a little further from the girl who once bit me over the last samosa at our cousin's wedding.
Two years ago, that drift nearly ended the ritual. I sat at the table on her birthday with the candle burning down and wrote nothing for an hour.
I did not know her anymore.
That was the truth I could not get around... The tea went cold in the fox mug and I felt like a fraud, a man throwing a party for someone he had lost touch with.
So I did something that still surprises me. I typed out the previous year's poem, the one about the wedding, and posted it on a community wall for poets, mostly to prove she had existed outside my kitchen. I did not expect anything... Strangers on the internet are not famous for their tenderness.
Three days later, a comment appeared under the poem: Is this the Mira who lived in Halsey Hall? Short, loud, drew foxes on everything? I think I knew your sister.
Her name was Dana. She had shared a dorm floor with Mira for one year of college, a year I knew almost nothing about because I was overseas and we were down to monthly phone calls. Dana and I wrote back and forth for weeks, and she handed me memories the way you hand someone photographs: carefully, one at a time.
Mira once danced on a cafeteria table to an old Whitney Houston song and got banned from the dining hall for a week, a punishment she reportedly framed. Mira talked a homesick freshman out of dropping out by teaching her to make instant noodles taste like their mother's cooking. Mira drew that fox, the same fox from the mug, on the dorm's whiteboard every Sunday night, so the week would start with something friendly.
I had thought my supply of sister was finite. A sealed archive, shrinking every time my memory dropped a detail. It turns out other people were holding pieces of her all along, and every piece they hand back gives me another year of material.
She keeps aging because she was never only mine.
You do not stop knowing someone just because they stopped being here. You just have to do the knowing for both of you.
Last year I finally entered one of the birthday poems into a monthly poetry contest, the poem about passing her in age, the one that begins from here on I am the older one, and you would never let me hear the end of it. It did not win... Mira would have found that hilarious. She would have printed the rejection and framed it next to her dining hall ban.
People sometimes ask, gently, when they find out about the ritual, whether it keeps the wound open. Whether nine years of birthday poems means I have failed to move on. I understand the question. I used to ask it myself, usually around two in the morning on March birthdays, staring at a candle flame like it owed me an answer.
But I have read enough about grief now to know that moving on was always the wrong assignment. Grief does not shrink. You just build a bigger life around it, and if you are lucky, you build rooms in that life where the person still gets to show up. My kitchen table, one night a year, is Mira's room. The rent is one poem... She has never once missed the party.
The candle is already on the table for Saturday. This year I know exactly what I am giving her, because Dana gave it to me first: at thirty-four, Mira dances on tables. She has a respectable job and a mortgage and a calendar full of adult obligations, and none of it has cured her, because nothing was ever supposed to. Somewhere in the poem there will be a cafeteria, and a Whitney Houston song, and a fox drawn on a whiteboard on a Sunday night, promising somebody a friendlier week.
I will light the candle at eleven. I will pour the peppermint tea I hate into the mug I love. The flame will burn down past the fox's ears before I finish, because it always does.
Happy birthday, Mira. Save me a seat wherever the party is.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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