Blood Sisters

"What is love?" 

This horrible question which has tortured the hearts and minds of human beings for millennia is one that has yet to be answered for certain by anyone else. Or, if it has, I am unaware of it. When I was six-and-three-quarters years old, I answered it. I don't mean to brag, I just mean to tell the truth. 

I still remember the night I learned of love. I can close my eyes and see it, feel it, smell it all: the dust particles dancing around the beam of light shining from the tiny silver flashlight in my sister's chubby hand; the brownish-purple stain on the sheet pulled over our heads from one of the many nights I watched my mother spill Merlot on her nightgown; the lingering smell of pumpernickel bread, stolen from the dinner table and harbored in a towel under our pillows; and my sister's glowing amber eyes, peering into mine more intently than anyone ever had, or ever has since. 

My mother married two men in her lifetime, each of whom granted her a child. She married my sister's father when she was eighteen, devastatingly beautiful and blissfully unaware of what her future would hold. I only heard my mother mention him once, and she said that it was a mistake, that I must never tell anyone what I'd heard.

It's been more than twenty years since I lay there in bed with my sister, watching in terror as she scratched her thumb so deeply that she broke skin. And as the first droplet of blood emerged, I saw her grin, tug my hand, and press her bloody thumb against the open papercut I'd given myself just hours before. Horrified, I told her to never do that again, that blood spreads diseases like that one that put Uncle Jerry in the hospital last year. "Shh, it's okay," she whispered. "We have the same blood." Seeing me no calmer than the moment prior, she sighed and explained, "All people have blood, Annie. We all bleed the same. And other people's blood can only hurt you if it's different from yours. But we're sisters. So we have the same blood. So mine can't hurt you." And from that moment I knew that I loved her more deeply than any cut, that her blood could never hurt me, and that it was because of that fact that I would never let her know she was a liar.