rough draft: nicholas.

I've replaced you out of necessity
because you were gone far before I knew you.
And now I find you
hanging, swinging at the end of your rope.
You're no longer swimming upstream.

But didn't I know you?
Your mother is mine and we
knew her by the same means.
She read to us through the womb
until she was too heavy to hold us.

This...event has placed you in her shadow forever,
swallowed up in the mimicked sadness
you'd read about so many times.