Happy Birthday, Kimberly Byrd.

Wherever you are.

Kim is/was my sister. More accurately, one of my sisters. My father has sired approximately 18 children (with lots of different women) thru the course of his lifetime and i'm the oldest. Kim is one year younger than me. The last time i saw her, she was 18 and had a child. At the moment, i can't even remember if it was a boy or a girl. Before that, i hadn't seen her since we were 9 or 10 years old.

I have one clear memory (but no hardcopy) of a photograph we took together. I was 9 and she was 8. She was sitting on a big brown leather easy chair and i was standing behind her. I had these goofy multicolored beads in my hair which i thought was so cool at the time. We were both smiling really big...two cute and sassy little girls happy to get to know each other as sisters. We had different mothers but we'd both visit our dad and hang out together. After a while, she stopped coming around. Probably because her mom didn't like dad (with good reason). Even when i saw her again as a teenager, the meeting was awkward, at best. We were strangers again. Somehow my dad had relocated her and invited both of us to his place. I think her and i had a chance to talk privately and i'm pretty sure i told her some very surprising(maybe not) and unpleasant things about our father. I would imagine it made her not want much more to do with him, and by extension, me. I never heard from her again.

Sometimes i think i want to find her but it would probably not be good for either one of us. I've been thru the whole 'finding a long lost sister' thing once already and the result was disappointing and stressful. You can't make strangers care about each other as family just because you tell them they are family. The heart just don't work that way.

But anyway, I hope she's having a great 34th birthday today.