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They named me Phoenix after their first daughter died in the hospital. She lived three hours and forty-seven minutes before her lungs gave out. I lived. That's what makes this so complicated.
Growing up in the shadow of a dead sister is like learning to breathe underwater. Everything feels muffled and wrong. I found her tiny clothes still folded in my closet when I was seven, pressed between tissue paper like flower petals in a bible. Newborn sized onesies with tags still attached.
Mom would stand in my doorway some mornings, staring at old NICU photos with hollow eyes and whisper my name like a prayer to the wrong god. Phoenix this, Phoenix that. But it never felt like she was talking to me. It felt like she was talking through me to someone who wasn't there.
Dad wasn't much better. He'd flinch every time he had to say my name, like the syllables physically hurt. His voice would crack on my birthday when he'd force himself to sing, and Mom would disappear into the bathroom afterward with red-rimmed eyes. I learned early that my existence was somehow both precious and painful to them.
The silence in our house was deafening. We moved around each other like ghosts, careful not to disturb whatever delicate balance kept us functioning as a family. I started keeping my laughter quiet, my footsteps soft. Whenever I forgot and spoke too loudly, Mom would get that look on her face, like I'd broken something sacred.
I discovered the truth buried in Mom's journal when I was sixteen. Phoenix was supposed to be our miracle baby. But she died, and we got stuck with her replacement instead. How do we love someone who exists because our real daughter doesn't? Some days I look at her and see Phoenix. Other days I see the stranger who took her place.
Reading those words felt like swallowing glass. Everything suddenly made sense with brutal clarity. I was living proof that their perfect Phoenix was gone forever, a daily reminder that their real daughter had failed where I succeeded.
I legally changed my name to Morgan the day I turned eighteen. No more carrying a dead girl's identity like an ill-fitting coat. The courthouse clerk smiled when she handed me the papers, congratulating me on my fresh start.
Mom found the paperwork two weeks later and collapsed on the kitchen floor like I'd shot her. You're unaliving her again, she sobbed. You're murdering our Phoenix. Dad stood behind her with empty eyes that looked right through me. Phoenix was all we had left of her.
When my college acceptance letter arrived addressed to Morgan Williams, Dad's text was brutal: Change it back or you're on your own. Phoenix deserves better than being abandoned twice.
I drove to their house that night. I found them in the backyard, feeding my childhood photos to a metal trash can filled with flames. Baby pictures, school portraits, Christmas mornings, all turning to ash. If you won't be Phoenix, then you're nothing to us, Mom said without looking up.
I was never your daughter, I said quietly, watching my face curl and blacken in the flames. I was her stand-in.
Dad looked up from the fire, ash smeared across his cheeks like war paint. Phoenix would have been everything you're not. Grateful. Loving. Worth the prayers we wasted begging God to save her.
Something cold and final settled in my chest. You want to know who Phoenix really was? She was the one who died because she was too weak to survive. I'm the one who fought to live every day for eighteen years.
Mom lunged at me then, screaming words I couldn't understand. I caught her wrists, held her burning gaze, and felt the last threads connecting us snap. You spent eighteen years mourning the wrong daughter.
This morning, three weeks later, Dad texted me one final time: We found Phoenix's medical records. The machines were turned off because she was brain-dead from birth complications. You were always the one who made it.
I stared at those words for an hour in my dorm room surrounded by boxes labeled Morgan. Then I typed back: I'm still Morgan. I'm still the survivor. And I buried Phoenix the day I realized she was your favorite ghost.
They haven't responded. I don't expect them to.