My family looks like me. Well kind of.

 I have my father’s fair skin and sense of humor. I have my mother’s face, hair, eyes, temperament, and brain. My brother and I share an understanding of how to grow up, even when you don’t want to. My hair is brown, but in the summer it gets lighter with streaks of red. My skin is fair with freckles, but in the summer it is always burnt with more freckles than you could count. My eyes are brown, but a deeper look makes them seem like honey. My hair is my mother's. She had the same wavy hair, not tamed by a brush, but by elbow grease and a prayer. 

She lost herself with the hair. I was young, and my father said it was the medicine that made it go, but I knew what it was. She was going. When she left, she was unrecognizable to me. Pallid skin, no hair, and eyes dimmed from a fight she knew she had lost. I carry this with me. I am the spitting image of her, relatives let me know every time they see me. “You look just like your mother.” I want to look like me. My brother is lucky, he isn’t a mini-me of my father.

 With light brown hair where my fathers is black, a short frame opposed to my father’s towering one, and skin that tans beautifully, my father and I are left looking like peeling lobsters in the summer. My brother has the same gait, a slow lumber one caused by years of physical work, the other by a lack of care. At family gatherings, I don’t look right. All of my father’s family is tall and limber. With shocks of ginger hair and freckled limbs that look like constellations, I am left looking plain. My mother’s family is not much better. Tanned limbs and dark hair are what greet me, I feel like the odd sheep. I feel solstice at home. With a mirror, I can see myself for who I am. I am me, with my frizzy hair lightened by the sun, my nose straight with a smattering of freckles, and eyes that understand. 

I don’t look like anyone but me.