My sister Saiyara

My sister Saiyara was a ticking time bomb on most days. What surprised me the most was that nobody else in the house could feel it. They just saw her going through the motions, doing everything she was supposed to do with that stoic look on her face. Kind of strange, the sort of dead people we live with. Saiyara kept telling me she felt dead. But to me she was the most alive person in the house. 

My sister Saiyara had a short fuse. I hoped and prayed everyday that I would be around whenever Saiyara felt like her fuse was about to go. I wanted to keep her ink flowing, keeping other things in place. If you left Saiyara to her devices, she could do one of two things. One, she could lock her doors and lose herself in that blog with just the one follower. That one follower always waited intently for the 'pop' to go off on his phone, alerting him of her posts. Two, she could walk down to the living room and sit there, probably hoping that somebody would notice something was amiss and ask her about it. But those enquiries never came and she went back to her room disappointed. 

My sister Saiyara always hated it when someone told her it was a phase. I know because I was the first one to make that mistake. I told her about the time that girl in high school had broken my heart and left me feeling blue for weeks. I spent a number of months trying to make it up to her and she only let up when I agreed to stay up till dawn with her, to hear how the early morning birds sing. She preferred those birds over humans and I started to slowly learn why someone would do that as I sat there with her. You could learn things from my sister Saiyara.

My sister Saiyara always listened when I told her it wasn't her fault. That was one of the few rare moments when her star seemed to shine a bit less and my words seemed more valuable than her's. At every other moment it would always be me listening to her. But during these moments her big round eyes would fix themselves on me as I repeated the same message over and over. She never told me what it was that wasn't her fault and to this day I don't know. But I made it clear that that thing, whatever it was, was not her doing and she never asked for it and during these brief exchanges my sister Saiyara seemed like what she was, just a scared little girl. But as soon as my words dried up, she'd go back to looking decades older than both of us combined.

My sister Saiyara tried taking pretty photos to feel nice and clean and sometimes she'd ask me to be in them. Everyone else in the house rolled their eyes at this little practice of ours. Saiyara acted like she hadn't noticed their eye rolls but I know she had, she had always been very observant. She was just an observant soul born into a family of unobservant everyday folk. My sister Saiyara knew this as well as most other things. I don't know which of these things did it for her in the end.