The closest we had ever been to our mother was in her womb, a time of obligations and pain. When our mother wailed us into the world and we detached from her, the cord was cut. Sometimes, the cord faintly lingers during car rides and grocery runs but with it hangs the rebirth of unfamiliarity. However, my sister and I entered the world for each other, we will outlive our parents together and return to them, together.

Our parents bore us and in return, we hid all the ways they scarred us. We were made for each other to hide, to fight, and to forgive. As the eldest daughter of an Asian family, it was different for her than it was for me. Her soul weeps. It has been tainted by wine stains and droplets from our mother’s eyes. In her inhabits a little girl, deep in her soul, she never grows up and whines. She was waiting for me to comfort her scattered heart. She stripped the roles off my mother and the relationship meant with our mother.

When she was born, she was embraced by our mother’s tender hands and when she was old enough, our father’s calloused hands gave her away.

In our language, the word for rice is “facang.” If you were to separate them into two words and translate it, it means “to become a child.” Our mother’s love is the pure white of milk and rice; her first and continuous gifts. With her hands, she fed us and held us snuggled to her chest. It can be warm, soft, and sticky. However, milk can spoil and rice can harden despite them looking the same.

When I clumsily serve the rice, the compacted block crumbles as I carry it from one plate to another. The next morning, she picks up after me and discards the hardened pieces of rice she left behind. Without her, instead I pick apart our memories and store them into my heart. In my mind, our laughter still echoes in our house.

Our love feels like spoiled milk and hardened rice, all the same and different. A love that was forgotten and left out to dry so that our hearts hardened. Absence only reminds us that we showed love at the wrong times.

Every once in a while, we crave facang; to be our mother’s child again.

My wounds were fresher then. Now they’re more like scabs, the itchy kind, too fresh to peel away but visible enough, itchy enough to remind me that it’s there. When it’s healed, underneath the scab is a blank page, a new beginning.

Instead, she was like a bruised fruit. People carved out the best part of her and discarded the rest. In our shared bunk bed room, I was left with her rotten soul, a half-bitten fruit, plaguing every other aspect of her life with mold and worms.

She thinks I don’t see her. That all that time I spent following her, I only saw her back. She is the epitome of excellence, a figure of hope for our family but for me, she was my shield. She spoke for me in front of the cashier at the Mcdonalds closest to our house while I secretly whispered my happy meal order in her ear. She was an extrovert, a talker, people pleaser and yet she said nothing at all. Her troubled face and laments when she turned away from the world were only reserved for me. I saw her clearer than anyone else. She was the first face I remembered, the first person I woke up to in the morning and the first person I go to when my heart breaks.

I got to see her bright, dimpled cheeks, crooked teeth and smile lines when she turned around to watch me grow. I will grieve for her once but she grieves me everyday. She watches me and mourns my accomplished monuments like a mother. We trade places. She watches the way I wash the dishes, how I fold clothes and the way I do my makeup; the way she does them. She and I are one and she has forgotten. Her tears blind her sight and hang at the edge of her pride.

She considers me the lucky one for having her to challenge life on first but she forgets that as sisters: that her suffering is mine.

Everyday I cheat on our memories. I visit the same places with different people, I serve rice for other people and at night, like an adulterous affair, I spill out every part of it. I whisper and wait to hear back but, sometimes, I think she has forgotten we are sisters.

Our mother has it worse than I. The steam from her cooked meals snake up to the sky with whispers of reunion. We too forget our mother.

Mothers trail behind their daughters. I fail to remember that my mother and grandmother too were and are a sister before they were anything to me. Perhaps, grandchildren are a second chance, to undo the mistakes from their own children.

My grandmother would track me down to find a moment to dye her hair. She’d sit on a plastic stool, the ones you would find stacked in front of an asian market and I’d slice layers into her crown of white hair for the black dye. Once she washed off her years of weariness and signs of old age, I’d go back in with a tweezer for the strands I missed. We sat there, two generations, as I plucked her’s away.

My sister has coated her long Asian locks with blonde dye , coating over her memories. But I would know her all the same. I knew her from orange scented fingers, the half of every fruit and the last McDonald’s chicken nugget.

Despite the bickering and moments of chaotic silence, sisterhood requires no spoken apology. It is heard and known just from the presence of half our heart.