I’m not actually sure he was my brother- for all I know, he could have been a she and I could be mourning a small girl instead. But the way you tell it, the way I see a mirror of my little self in your heart tricks me into thinking he was my brother. You look at me, and this derivative yet similar mirage of me appears beside me, and it’s easier to think of it as a boy because I am still nothing but a boy. And so, I tell myself that I killed not a sister, but a boy.

Every living thing in the ocean is scared to sleep, and not just because they are scared for their lives- they worry that they’ll drift. That in this already unnavigable, unintelligible expanse of blue, that they will get even more lost.

Being lost isn’t a fact, it’s feeling. It’s a fear.

It’s not just that they are scared of being dragged away by the currents, either. Otters sleep by holding hands with others; whales take turns watching each other; fish find homes together in a coral crook, and it is all because they fear losing each other.

So being lost is about letting go of someone else, too.

You have cried twice where I could see, and once where I couldn’t. I’m sure you have cried as many times as tears you have shed, for we are nothing but feeling humans, but I was still a boy and remember only these three.

You cried when your father passed away. He was not my grandfather, for I did not know him before he left; the words “Wai Gong” have never even left from between my lips, like a dove that never needed to be smashed. Yet I knew he was your father, so I looked from between the stair rails as you cried and my father held you at the kitchen counter, and the next thing I knew was that you left for China without me.

And so, I knew that when you cried, you would leave. And that was what I knew of loss.

Twice was when you were fighting with my father. I don’t remember if he threw plates this time. I do remember learning to clear the table quickly if your voices grew too loud, thinking that I wouldn’t want the food to go everywhere. Thinking especially that I really would not want to pick out little specks of ceramic from a dish, like we pick around chili peppers for a little slice of meat, and that if I fucked up I would swallow a little piece of a anger, of a plate and it would tear up my stomach and rip up my guts and it would come out the other side of me, having ruined me but stayed pristine. And that’s what I knew of anger.

But this time, you fought, and I can’t remember if there was a plate involved. I was seven, and I was in the middle of two twisters of anger whose winds didn’t resolve disagreement but merely fanned the storm. I saw the little dewdrops form on the sides of your tired eyes, and I raised my voice for what must have been the first time in a storm like this. And being heard over the thunder, I screamed to at you to stop and escaped as swiftly as I could to my little upstairs room.

But floors are thin, and even though I pulled the covers over my ears, your voices blamed each other for making me cry. I didn’t even know the words yet, but you dared my father to leave you, to divorce him, that the love you felt was long dead, and I drowned out the voices by mumbling to myself, silly little words to pass the time that I used to use while I was in timeout, when I needed to be punished but you told yourself you shouldn’t hit me, facing a wall, back turned to the world.

Hours later, when I was still mumbling to myself in the bottom layer of my bunk bed, you came in, voice tired from being the storm, and you rubbed the shoulders you thought were awake and said, “Me and your father would never split up. We love you.” And I pretended to be asleep, because I thought that would be easier than seeing your face again, one that loved a killer enough to make you stay for a man you had wanted to leave just hours before.

When morning came and I made my breakfast before being driven to school, it seemed like the anger had gone through the both of you, and I learned that even if anger tears people and hearts up, we just walk around like we aren’t dying, like our organs aren’t shredded into bloody bits.

And so, I knew that when you cried, you were scared of letting go of your life too, and so you held on to me like an otter holds her most precious babies. And that was what I knew of love.

The third you told me about; you told me this story twice, thinking I might have forgotten. Unfortunately, the first time sat in my flesh, the guilt burrowed into the meat of my body like a squirming maggot, festering, and it never left.

I was no more than five, you say, and we were walking around a Canadian Tire for God knows what reason, and I saw a little dinner placemat on one of those cheap wire spinning racks that displayed useless toys. I asked if I could get the pirate one with a traceable treasure maze on the back, and when I showed you the Sharpie adventure possibilities, you saw nothing but the price tag. That $1.50 we couldn’t afford yet, on my father’s nothing salary as a night-shift electrician and your terrible job that underpaid you because you were a woman and were Asian. So you softly rubbed the top of my head and said sorry, and put the placemat back while I skipped forward ahead of you.

And you told me then, that was the worst you ever felt as a mother. While I was bouncing around a bargain bin ball, you silently cried in a Canadian Tire because we were poor, and because of me. Because a child, in all their innocent selfishness, didn’t understand how asking for a plastic placemat could cause their mother to be pulled apart from the inside out, how a woman could be put inside a maze, looking for cents on the dollar, trying to find the exit but without a Sharpie-God drawing a path forward.

You tell the story as a joke now; the pirate placemat sits in the bottom of a top corner drawer in our renovated kitchen, alongside every other symbol of miserably worked-for middle-class wealth you had always wanted, but I remember the story now better than maybe even you do.

And so, I know when you cried, it was because of me. And that was what I knew of suffering.

Otters typically have two to three babies in a litter. Otters grieve for their dead cubs by taking care of them even after they die, until the dead body finally stops floating, and sinks away, carried by a current that has probably swirled in while the mother is away looking for food so it can feed it.

Up to 50% of otter cubs die before maturity. And so another reason otters are scared of drifting away is that they might finally have to move on from corpses of their young; the ocean takes them away.

I slept in the bottom bed of a bunk bed. I rarely climbed the top of the ladder, because I was so scared of heights, so it remained mysteriously empty to me.

I never really understood why I had a bunk bed as an only child.

The way I killed my little brother is very simple. Or at least, the way you told it to me, on a walk we took at noon before I left for university, it was simple.

I never had a twin; I didn’t consume him in the womb. I didn’t push a stroller off a cliff and I never dropped a baby on the head.

The way you tell it is that one day, you saw me as a baby, swaddled up and useless, being bumped on my father’s lap while he played Need for Speed 2 on his computer. You saw me giggling and entranced by the flashing lights, happy as could be, whilst you were run down, having cooked dinner and now having to do the dishes, having come home from work and needing to clean the bathrooms yourself, having to lose every Sunday to folding laundry at home. While you were being grinded away by motherhood, sharpened too far like a thin knife on a whetstone, I laughed and babbled, and my father was the one bringing me joy.

And so, you told me, you would never have the second child you always wanted. You lost, you loved, you suffered, and you cried, and this aching scene is what you would get in return. You wanted to remain kind enough to still be my mother and to be a wife, so you said you would never go through this again. You didn’t.

And so, my top bunk never got filled, and when we moved out of our first home I was given a bed without a pair on top of it. We brought the little pirate placemat with us, and I know you kept around the blue Mickey Mouse covers I pulled over my head when I was seven and just a little boy. And as I grew, we put those things away. We put away that things that a small boy would have loved, things that you sacrificed for me to have.

Like the ocean current pulling away a small body to a watery tomb, I made my mother let go of the son she never had.

I’ll never know what his name would have been; if he would have been the clever engineer that I refused to be or the son who was good at sports instead of hopelessly clumsy or the one that actually cared about private school outcomes more than public school friends.

I’ll never know if he would have called you on days other than the weekends, if he would resent you for never accepting who he was or how good he was the same way I do, or if he would have even loved me, forgiven me for being born first.

I’ll always be sorry for making you let go, for making you lost. And I’m sorry for killing my little brother.