I don't know how to speak to you Without carrying everything at once. So I'll start here With what the papers never asked And the courts could never hold.
You & I come from the same Woman. She was our mother Before she became a headline, Before her name was spoken Only in past tense. That truth stays No matter what happened after.
When I read about that night, I feel the split again, Love on one side, Horror on the other, And nowhere to set them down. I am not writing to rewrite facts. I am writing because silence Has already taken too much from us.
I think about what shaped you. What shaped me. About how pain doesn't arrive Suddenly, Fully formed. It accumulates, Through addiction, loss, systems that Break families early And call it protection.
None of this erases what happened. None of it brings our Mom back. There is poem strong enough To undo that night, Or soften the reality of it.
But I need you to know this: You are still my sister. That doesn't disappear Because grief became unbearable. Because alcohol blurred what should Never be blurred. Because tragedy took everything Too far.
I don't know what you remember. I don't know what memories haunt You Or what silence lives in your chest. I imagine you carry weight That has no name, That no sentence can complete.
I carry my own, A different kind of loss, But loss all the same. A mother gone. A family that never got the chance To heal before it shattered.
I hold anger. And sorrow. And questions with no place to land. I hold boundaries And still I hold grief for you, too.
This is not forgiveness written Prematurely. This is not forgetting. This is acknowledgment, That we are both daughters of the Same woman, Both shaped by a history that failed us, Both surviving something That never should have happened.
I don't know what comes next for us. I only know that love Does not always look clean or simple, And sometimes it speaks By refusing to erase either the harm Or the humanity.
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