there are two kinds of sisters.
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there is the first kind, made of women grafted to you like mismatched tree branches, borne of flesh rubbing against flesh so long the two bodies are bound by layers of dried blood, partially healed skin.
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maybe you fell in together when you were children, slept in hideous purple sleeping bags on each other's living room floors, fought while wearing too much eyeliner, and you assumed this made you members of the same tribe. but there was no real love to hold you, only scar tissue and folded notes from your free period after lunch.
later you drifted further apart, separated by life, which was meant to bind you together. but when you turn around, strangely, they're still there, the siamese twin hanging from your back, present only out of habit, but never leaving you alone. the sharp pain of tearing that bond is too much for them to bear, and maybe you too, the sudden awareness that you haven't had each other for too many years, the shocking sound of only your breathing in the room. it's a tricky bond, shallow but old.
--
there is a second kind.
--
it is also by blood, but not scabbing, not superficial, not heaped on your skin in layers of childish confidences and hastily resolved fights.
--
it is more that you recognize her blood, wholly intact. you are drawn to the scent and the heat of it, see in her a woman on your river. you turn and walk together true sisters, not because you tried to make it so, to defend yourself from loneliness, but because now you are a woman who has been alone and is unafraid of its hollow threats, a woman who wants to find the other lionesses, wants to lend her strength to a pack holy and terrible.
--
it is these women you find and follow, these you laugh and catch up to, theirs the hands you hold. your blood is the same not for torn veins, girlish arms forced together to join these flows, but because it has always been that way, since the time before either of you were born.
--
brandish the scalpel, perform that surgery, hellish though it may seem. leave all others behind, anger, and fear, and the red crust that violence leaves behind. Find these sisters, women as we were meant to be, with the strength and sense to bind wounds instead of coddle them.
