Poison

Sir Issac Newton was a bastard.

He was, undoubtedly, a brilliant man. But he had a nasty habit of writing up his work and holding on to it. He would go as far as writing letters to his so-called colleagues, taunting them with hints to the answers they were seeking that he had supposedly already uncovered. Then, when they inevitably scooped him, he would (ab)use his substantial influence as England and Europe's primier scientist to shut them down and insert his work first.

I've done the "Newton was a bastard" spiel many times. I never thought I would say I knew exactly how Newton felt.

My little sister is 15. She's everything I'm not- social, outgoing, confident, driven. I blame this on her having a stable environment since she was in elementary school, whereas my education was punctuated by any number of school changes and moves across state lines. But I don't really know. It could well be that she is simply better at playing life than I am.

There are very few accomplishments in life that really mean much to me. One of them, for most of my life, has been to become a published author. I've worked a long time at it. But I always told myself there would time in the future to worry about it, made excuses for rarely showing my work to anyone, letting it idle on my hard drive, never quite finishing anything. Convincing myself that if I couldn't be the best I couldn't be anything. Telling myself that because I was so harshly critical of other people, and felt justified in this criticism, that others would take the same approach with me.

Last month my baby sister wrote a book. Not "literature", one of those gossipy teen novels. But she wrote it, in a single month, and she finished it. And now she's submitting it, and has already gotten an email from a literary agent wanting to see a manuscript.

I know there is a huge gap between that and publication. But I am so full of jealousy, frustration, resentment, and self-anger that I want to wring her skinny perfect neck. My own sister.

I feel like she stole something from me. I feel like she took this thing that was mine, alone, in our family, and usurped me. Such thinking is, of course, completely illogical.

But it's too late. If she does get this thing published, from now on anything I do will be something she did first, something I did to parrot or catch up with her.

I'm writing this on my fifteen minute work break, time I should be getting food since I haven't eaten yet today. I had to get this out, before it killed me.