I don’t like his wife.  I have never liked any of his girlfriends.  He is right when he tells me that I will never be happy for him.  His happiness seems to be proportionate to my own unhappiness.  

The last time I was happy it was just us, him and me.  Us against the world.  His first girlfriend came after the fighting.  I wondered if he started the fighting just so he could go out with her without feeling guilty about me.  Me at the centre of the world which is what he is always accusing me of.  It is not all about you.  But his girlfriend, I think, was actually about me.  She was about as opposite to me as you could make her.  She had pale skin and pale hair and blushing pale cheeks and eyes that never looked at you because she was being shy and pretty all the time.  She wore cardigans and little old-fashioned dresses with flowers on them.  She looked really tiny in those dresses like if she missed a meal she would starve completely to death.  I said all of this to him and yes, I was picking a fight because he could love her and he wouldn’t love me. 

Why don’t you just punch me in the face I said to him, watching the spit come out and settle on the front of his hoodie.

Don’t you think I have done enough damage?  He said to me then and we both nodded.  He nodded because he thought that sleeping with me did the damage. I nodded because I knew that not sleeping with me did the damage. 

He is not sleeping with his wife and I look at her in her little baby doll dress and I see that sad look in her face and I know that it is a similar sad look to my own.  The people who have been abandoned by my brother.  She and I should be firm friends, but instead I hate her because at one point it was possible for him to lover her.  I am sorry for her and I hate her all at once. 

It can’t be me and him against the world, not even now when he is separated and I know how he will be feeling and I could comfort him.  We sit at the table with the rest of the family and his sad wife two seats away from him and only me knowing that they are ending it now.  She told me.  She said she knew we were close, him and me and I laughed then because we haven’t been close for years.   

What can I do to stop this happening?  What can I do to save it.  

Nothing can save it of course. My brother burns all things down and then he rises from our ashes and he builds something else up until it is almost done and ready to be undone.  

Sleep in a separate room, I tell her because I can’t bare to think of her with her skinny little naked body beside his.  Don’t let him have sex with you, remembering his perfect penis rising all gorgeous and erect from his lap. Don’t let him kiss you, because his kisses are the thing I have never let go of.  The feeling like his mouth is a perfect mirror image of my own.  The kiss being the place where the edges of him blur into the edges of me.  More so than even sex itself.  More than when I take him in my mouth and swallow a part of him.  All of this sadness sitting bitter in my stomach because he is my brother and they say it is wrong for us but I know it is the best thing ever and I will never, ever, have the best thing ever again.