The one who stayed knows the number exactly
She can tell you the year the parent's health turned. She can tell you how many weddings she missed, how many friendships thinned to annual texts, how many times she calculated whether she could afford to leave for a weekend and decided she couldn't. The one who stayed did not make a single dramatic choice. She made the same small choice, again and again, until it became her life's shape.The leaving sibling does not see this as clearly. Distance does something to specifics, it softens them into a general awareness that things were hard, that someone bore more, that there is a debt of some kind. But the leaving sibling rarely knows the exact number. She knows the shape of the sacrifice without knowing its weight.This is the first asymmetry. The one who stayed is living inside a very precise count. The one who left is living inside a feeling. Both of them are right about what they know. Neither of them knows what the other knows.
