Dear sib,

I wish that things were different, but I probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the fact that you were miscarried a year before I was born.

To be honest, I didn’t miss you much while growing up. Maybe we wouldn’t have been that close as children. Maybe I would have envied you for being a whole year older. Maybe you would have gotten me in trouble by telling me that if I broke open the TV screen, I could step inside the TV universe.

I also had enough real and imaginary friends who filled in your role as my sibling. Our parents even let them come on family vacations with us because they were always worried that I would be too lonely without you. Mom and Dad also spoiled me beyond what they were financially comfortably capable of by paying for my piano and dance lessons, filling the basement with unnecessary toys such as a life-sized bear and toy kitchen set, and even buying me a large gymnastics mat when they knew that I was about to leave for college soon.

However, I would trade all of the attention and spoiling for a relationship with you.

Maybe you would have been my person right now. Growing up in the same house as someone forces you to get to know them. We could have both understood that Mom throws daily adult temper tantrums at Dad and that it is OK to laugh when she is squealing at him for making her 10 minutes late to a potluck. When fights got serious, we could have hidden in the basement and eaten almost expired canned soup together. It could have been fun with you.

Sib, I’ve been really wishing that you were here so that I could ask you if our parents' relationship has disappeared right in front of our eyes or if they’re just “joking” with humor that is too serious for me to bear to laugh. Do people joke about divorce? Do people joke about being done with their marriage the minute when one of them gets too old to take care of themselves? I want to believe that they're still in love.

Would you tell me that I’m cold-hearted if you knew that I am fully aware that our mom is fighting a war with herself, but I am too angry at her for dragging our whole family in it to help? My blood almost boils when she instructs other people that they need to be on a diet. I know that she can’t help that she wants to weigh herself anywhere from five to ten times a day, but I still resent that she made me feel the same way about myself behind closed doors. It stings me to admit that the last non-superficial conversation that I had with her was when someone was literally dying. Doesn't she know that Dad would love to see her smile in pictures, even though smiling causes wrinkles around the mouth? We don’t look back at photo albums to see what a 50-year-old Barbie doll looks like.

Most of all, I have to enter the adult world soon and I’m panicking. Both Mom and Dad came from large families, so I’m used to aunts and uncles having our family’s backs, but what about me and you? I hope that we won’t have to worry about this for much longer, but I don’t want to be alone. I want to take care of Mom and Dad, but I want someone to sit in the waiting room with me and laugh about how Mom loves to take close-up selfies like a middle school child and how Dad can magically fix almost anything that I accidentally break. I want someone to understand what it was like to grow up with our parents and I want that to be you.

I still feel like I’m missing a part of my family when I hear about the adventures that my friends take with their siblings. I wish that I had a chance to be the most annoying part of your day by trying to copy everything that you did and I wish that you were there to tattle on me when I didn’t practice my piano. I wish that we could be together, supporting each other, as we both would have been trying to figure out how to get our lives together and be fully-fledged adults.

I’m not angry that you don’t exist and I have never blamed our parents for keeping me as an only child. Had I been in the same place that they were, I might have made the same decision. I will always be an only child and it has both benefits and losses. I have enjoyed being the center of my parents' universe and I have enjoyed not being compared to you. It’s just that, sometimes, when I hear how my friends talk about their relationship with their siblings, I wonder how my life would have been different if our relationship could have been part of it. I hope that you know that I think that you would have been a great sibling.

Your little sister,