I’ll always be sorry for being better than you:
grades, basketballs, stairs you struggled to climb.
I carried the cage I helped you craft, even while I failed
to destroy it. With tea, hugs, worried questions,
I ground my superiority into your exhausted frame.

I never minded being mistaken for you because you
were such a part of me already.
We were two and one. We wandered through the house,
and you tried to break free as I tried to hold on.

We survived to find the disease in your blood. We survived
to move away to school, and when you relapsed we survived
through to now, though I am alone in this room.

My twin, was our childhood as hard, as easy,
as simple as we remember?
When classmates called me the wrong name,
did I resent our similar faces, or did I think,
somehow, your name was right?