The sisters, they trail away in long accumulations. The first, the farthest ones, so much younger that the distance was built in. They lived from the beginning in a different place altogether, but they none of them ever gave up their resentment at not being the eldest, as if this were some prized state. Some privileged condition. Before they were all in school even, I was off on the first crossing, leaning into the breathless parabola of becoming youngest sister in someone else's family, taking years and years to learn it, probably never very well, sometimes forgetting that my new older sister was not an aunt. You become so multiple, the eldest and the youngest at once, it's like a hybridization. This is what it's like to provide new blood. In the next crossing, I was to be twinned, in a sisterhood so abstracted one couldn't speak of it. A bloodless exogamy which pulsed instead the glittering grace of demented angels. Indeed the two of us were the very angel's wings, crashing together at the center of his spine, our finest filaments meshing as naturally, as awkwardly, as the first idea of fabric. Together we bent, and as suddenly, violently swept apart. No long trail could end on such a note. Wings lift, after all. And the going out will be circular. Sisters, still the sisters, and I'm eldest again. Oh, you girls. We (the outsider sisters, not the castout sisters) can sit around a tavern table drinking beer, chatting like school friends or PTA moms, like the vagabonds of love we really are. But we are directed elsewhere, not towards each other, and the links are cold and pale, fading quickly, they will need regular tending. The sisters are so far away. It's as if I see them only through this window.