She was the first.
The first to hold our mother’s secrets. The first to face our father’s wrath. The first to be told, in quiet, complicated ways, that love meant carrying more than your share and never letting it show.
The eldest. One and a half years older.
She wasn’t the villain. She was the vault. The one who absorbed the tension in the air, the bruises no one spoke about, and the shame that hovered in corners we never dared name.
Growing up, she knew everything before I did. She was the one who knew where our mother had gone when she left us at twelve. She was the one who kept that silence. Maybe she thought she was protecting us. Maybe she was. Maybe she felt the youngest was too young. Maybe she felt I was too loud. Too likely to tell an aunt, or say it out loud in a way that would break the rules of our silence.
She got beaten for knowing. Our father would beat information out of her. And when the youngest and I defended her, we’d get hit too. But she always kept the secrets.
She presented well. Even when we could all see she was unraveling.
In primary school, her teachers could tell something was off. But she was the kind of girl who smiled through it. Who got good grades. Who never wanted to talk.
Today, she still doesn’t want to talk.
“Why do you always hang on to the past? Just forget and move on.”
She says it like the past is a coat you can hang on a hook and walk away from.
But it clings. It lingers.
Especially when you were never allowed to name it in the first place.
She was also slim. I was not. That difference became its own kind of hierarchy.
I remember once standing with her in front of a mirror. She looked at our reflections and said, “You’re the before. I’m the after.”
She laughed, but my body shrank inside itself. That memory never left.
Our parents joined in. They always made me feel shame about my body. “Your bum is too big, you need to wear longer tops.” They said it with concern. With love. With fear of embarrassment.
But it wasn’t love. It was regulation. It was control. It was shame dressed up as protection.
She never stopped them.
When the neighbourhood kids would mock me—calling me Yokozuna, pretending I caused tremors with every step—she would watch. Sometimes she looked like she was holding back a laugh. She never told them to stop. She didn’t join in. But she didn’t stop them.
I started tying sweaters around my waist. Every day. For years. Until well into university.
She calls me sensitive.
She says it casually. Sometimes with a smirk. Sometimes with a sigh.
But it burns. Because she was there. She saw the beginnings of my sensitivity. And she did nothing to soften them.
Now when she shows up to protect, to perform care, it feels performative.
It feels like a show she’s running for the world, not a truth she’s living with me.
Because she still won’t talk about the past.
She wants tidy. I want truth.
And in that difference lies the whole fracture between us.
This isn’t an indictment.
It’s an instalment.
Because before I can forgive, I have to remember.
And she refuses to let us remember together.