Why You and Your Sibling Grew Apart Without Either of You Doing Anything Wrong

You and your sibling used to be a country. You shared a border so seamlessly that it was hard to tell where one of you ended and the other began. Same room, same fights over the TV remote, same whispered conversations after the lights went out when Ma thought you were asleep. You had a language that didn't need words. A look across the dinner table that meant "Papa's in a mood." A nudge that meant "cover for me." You were allies in the small, daily war of growing up in a house where the adults made the rules and the children navigated them together, side by side, a team of two against the world.

And now? Now your sibling is a country you need a visa to enter. The border appeared without announcement. No wall, no fence, just a growing distance that expressed itself in shorter phone calls, fewer inside jokes, longer gaps between messages. When did the last real conversation happen? Not the "happy birthday" texts or the family group chat replies. The last real one, the kind where you said something true and they said something true and the truth created a bridge instead of a wall.

You can't even point to a fight. That's the thing. If there had been a fight, there would be something to resolve, a wound to clean and bandage. This is not a wound. This is erosion. The slow wearing away of closeness by the ordinary forces of adult life. Different cities. Different jobs. Different partners who brought different worlds. Different versions of yourselves that grew in different directions the way two branches on the same tree grow, same roots, same trunk, eventually reaching for entirely different patches of sky.

What you don't say at family dinners

You sit next to them at Diwali and the proximity is physical, not emotional. You pass the dal. You comment on the food. You laugh at Papa's same old jokes. And between you and your sibling there is a politeness that did not used to be there, a careful, measured politeness that is the exact opposite of the carelessness you once shared, because carelessness is a privilege of closeness and you are no longer close, you are cordial, and cordial is the saddest distance two people who once shared a bedroom can arrive at.

Ma notices. Of course she notices. "Tum dono pehle kitna ladte the," she says, laughing, nostalgic, not understanding that the fighting was the intimacy. The fighting meant you cared enough to disagree. What you have now is worse than fighting. What you have now is the absence of enough feeling to fight about anything.

You want to grab them by the shoulders sometimes. You want to say "what happened to us?" But the question feels dramatic, and your family does not do dramatic, your family does fine, your family does "sab theek hai," and so you eat the dal and pass the roti and the evening passes and you drive home and the drive is quiet and the quiet has the particular flavour of a loss that nobody else recognises as a loss because the person is still alive, still present, still sitting at the same table, just unreachable in a way that has nothing to do with distance and everything to do with the fact that growing up sometimes means growing apart, and growing apart from a sibling is a grief that has no name, no ritual, no acknowledgment, just a space at the dinner table that is occupied by a person you love and can no longer reach.

Have you ever tried to say this to someone who wouldn't immediately respond with "just call them more" or "plan a trip together"? Someone who understands that the problem is not logistics but something deeper, something that lives in the gap between who you were to each other and who you have become?