The Poem I Read at My Sister's Wedding
I got through twelve lines before both of us stopped pretending.
My sister asked me not to write anything original for her wedding. "Read something safe," she said on the phone, in the flat voice she saves for instructions she expects me to ignore. "Rumi. Neruda. Anyone dead, anyone famous. Twelve lines maximum, and then you owe me a dance."
We both knew why she said it. We had not really spoken in two years, and a microphone is a dangerous thing to hand a writer with unfinished business.
The silence between us did not start with a scandal. It started with our mother's hospital bills and a spreadsheet, with who paid for what and who kept score, and then it calcified the way these things do, until we were two women who sent each other birthday texts with no punctuation.
When her wedding invitation arrived, my name was printed on it in gold, and I cried in the stairwell of my building holding the envelope, because gold foil was the warmest thing she had said to me since 2023.
So of course I searched "wedding poem for sister" at one in the morning like a coward. The internet offered me sunshine and sisterly bonds and rhymes about butterflies. Nothing about spreadsheets. Nothing about the specific guilt of loving someone you stopped calling. I closed the laptop and did the thing she had explicitly forbidden.
I wrote her one.
It took eleven nights. I know because I drafted it the way you defuse something: slowly, sweating, one wire at a time.
I wrote about the year she taught me to ride a bicycle by lying that she was holding the seat. I wrote about the night before she left for college, when she labelled everything in the kitchen so I would not starve, including a jar marked SUGAR, NOT FOR CRYING INTO. I wrote the line I had been carrying around for two years like a stone in my shoe: that she was my first witness, and whoever married her was inheriting my job but never my place.
Twelve lines exactly. She had said twelve as a limit. I took it as a form.
I did not trust myself to know if it was any good, and I could not exactly ask her, so I posted it anonymously on a community wall for poets a few weeks before the wedding, the way you leave a note under a wiper blade and walk away fast. Strangers were kind to it. One comment said, "Whoever this is for, read it to her out loud." I screenshotted that comment and then did not look at it again, because some encouragement is too expensive to keep in your pocket.
The wedding was in November, in a hall with a rented heater that hummed like a relative. My sister wore red and gold and our mother's earrings. During the photographs she held my elbow for balance while she fixed her shoe, absent-mindedly, the way she used to when we shared a room, and I had to look very hard at the fairy lights.
Then someone handed me the microphone.
"This is for my sister," I said. "It's twelve lines. I was told anyone dead and famous. I'm sorry in advance that I am neither."
She laughed. Everyone laughed.
Line one was easy... Line four, the bicycle, got the aunties. Line seven was the sugar jar, and her new husband looked at her like he had just been given a missing chapter. And then I hit line ten... the witness line, the stone from my shoe, and my voice did the thing where it stops being a voice.
I stood there in front of two hundred people, holding a piece of paper that had started shaking, and I could not read my own handwriting through the water in my eyes.
That was when my sister stood up.
She crossed the floor in her heavy red lehenga, took the microphone out of my hand, and finished the poem. From memory... Every word, including the two I had changed in the final draft.
The hall went very quiet, in the way a room does when it realizes it is watching something it was not invited to.
"You posted it on the wall," she said, off the microphone, just to me. "You used the same username you've used since we were teenagers, you absolute idiot. I've known for three weeks. I've been reading it every night."
I got through twelve lines before both of us stopped pretending. Pretending the two years had been about money. Pretending the birthday texts were enough. Pretending that being right, about the spreadsheet, about who called last, about any of it, had ever once kept either of us warm.
She was my first witness. Whoever loves her now inherits my job, but never my place.
We did not have a cinematic reconciliation... There was no speech. She pressed her forehead against mine for about four seconds, which for our family is roughly a decade of therapy, and then the DJ, sensing his moment with the precision of a surgeon, played the song we used to dance to in the kitchen when I was nine and she was twelve.
She held out her hand. "You owe me," she said.
So I danced at my sister's wedding with mascara on my chin, and her husband danced with our mother, and the rented heater hummed, and none of it was safe, and all of it was ours.
Later that night I found her alone at the gift table, holding the poem. Someone had rescued the paper from me and given it to her, creases and all. She was folding it, carefully, into the ribbon of her bouquet.
"Twelve lines," she said. "You actually listened. First time in thirty years."
"You memorized them," I said. "First time in thirty years."
We have talked every week since. Not about the spreadsheet... we may never talk about the spreadsheet, and I have made my peace with the idea that some accounts get closed rather than settled. I have been writing about her openly now, about the kind of love that survives its own silences, about starting again with the same people, which nobody warns you is harder than starting with strangers. She reads all of it. She corrects my memory in the comments, publicly, like a sister.
The photographer sent the album in January. There is one picture I did not know was being taken: me mid-collapse at line ten, paper shaking, and my sister already rising out of her chair, one hand gathering her lehenga, her mouth already forming the next word.
She knew the poem better than I did.
She always held the seat longer than she admitted.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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