Sisterly

Secrets are beads on that Pandora bracelet you love so much. They are the drops of red nail polish left behind when you went out last night. They are the sticks of gum you carry with you, knowing their smell will hide the vodka on your breath – or is it the smoke-smell clinging to your fingers? I know where you were at lunchtime. Secrets are a wreath around you, my sister, and I learnt a long time ago that your secrets come in threes.

There is one you will tell in a whisper, a tangle of cautious words half-lost in the distance from my ear to your mouth. There is one that I will find, a scrap of paper tucked into a book I lent you months ago. And there is one you will keep hidden inside your perfect smile, at least until New Year’s. Because with a glass in your hand, you know you’ll tell everyone then.

But when they are your secrets, I know that one of the three is a lie. And there are some lies you hold within you while I watch, ones you’ll never tell, ones you keep trapped behind barred windows and a padlocked door. As I do.

My secrets are even worse than yours, perhaps because I am so much better at hiding them. No-one ever looks inside a letter to see the words within it, do they? I learnt that when I was younger. So now I keep my secrets in my writing, in the ink-soaked pages that cover my bedroom floor. They are the ones I wrote last Wednesday at four thirty in the morning while you swore at me through the wall. You never were an early-bird, but lack of sleep does wonders for your inventiveness.

It’s sad, because even if I tried to show you my secrets I know they’d never reach your skin. They’d be caught in the net of sighs and sidelong glances and bathroom queues that hangs between us, caught just as yours so often are when you pull me close and cry. It was years ago that I found only knotted twine beneath my fingers as I reached out to touch you, my sister, and since then I’ve learned I cannot cut my own way out of this net.

Will you lend me a knife?