For the Older Sibling

My life is weak sauce. Not bad for what it is, but still.
You exemplify gloriously what I’m not even close to having:
You know more words and more ways to talk. You stand eight inches taller and look ten tons stronger.
You’ve spent your entire life wearing different clothes than me, and working and walking and driving to other places.
Everyone younger than me looks up to you, if they’re old enough to realize.
And I can only assume that the things in your head are all a different color from mine.
Whenever you tilt your head up to the sun when we’re outside, the reflection makes me think of light going through handfuls of diamonds and crystals.
What’s more than that, you know how to handle what I can’t even describe. While I was hiding in the kitchen that one night thinking about other things, there you were in your room alone—in the face of it,
staring out in the street like you had just seen the past and the future in the neighbor's front yard.
I couldn’t believe it when you told me you were jealous of anyone else—not your college friend with the cool job; not our cousin; not the kids with the boathouse or the fictional people from the shows when I was eleven.
I always admired your dark eyes, for seeing deeper and farther than any of those the rest of us see out of.
What’s so heavy that you possibly lack, that I couldn’t eagerly throw off to the wind?

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