Drabble 169 – Connate

I like being an only child. I never had to compete for attention. I developed an appreciation for being alone; if I’m too social too frequently, I get this horrible craving for being alone that turns me into a monster. I don’t know if that’d be different if I had a sibling growing up. But I’ve always had this curiosity about what it’s like to have someone close-ish to you in age who was always present. Would I be better at frequent socializing, if that’s how I’d been raised?

Who knows. It’s a relationship I don’t have, and while I don’t feel at all like there’s some gaping hole in my life where a sibling ought to go, it does bother me a big that it’s an experience that I can’t ever really have. I just have to imagine, which, while not necessarily a bad thing, always feels like it misses the mark.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

CONNATE

(a.) from Old Latin gnasci, for “give birth, beget”

Allied in origin or nature.

Siblings are supposed to fight, and they do, loudly and sometimes violently. She has a scar on her knee from when he pushed her in a parking lot, and he has a permanently misshapen fingernail from her only half-faked bad aim while assembling a treehouse. Each assumes they ought to feel bad about it, and sometimes they do, but more often they think about them as visible marks of the impact they’ve had on one another’s lives. 

Siblings are supposed to love one another, and they do, quietly and contemplatively. In half-assed holiday cards, in pinkies twined together, in spells whispered in moonlight.