I had another shitty, wasted night. Pierced through my savings and invested time and energy in a void of sexual frustration, female rejection, bad music, second hand cigarette smoke and unmet expectations. One of those fucking Friday nights in the city.

I thought about sitting down this morning and write the details of last night’s action in one of my columns. A decadent morning ritual from the last year of my life. But I couldn’t. My sister Lorna had a miscarriage. Anything that I write after hearing the news on Thursday seems so fucking irrelevant, shallow and stupid. While my sister spent weeks hiding her pregnancy, I was fucking around, drinking practically every day and whining about my emotions in my obnoxious little written rant. While I was eating my organic salad-and-meat lunch at work, while I was buying some more wine in the supermarket, while I was flirting on Whatsapp; my sister was flushing her dead unborn boy down the toilet, afraid that she was gonna bleed to death.

Guilt is a very useless feeling to have, but it’s the only thing that seems right at the moment. More than a few words of comfort, I couldn’t do shit for my sister. From my white privileged throne in Copenhagen, words is all I could give. The fucking Writer with his fucking words.

How come life turned out so different for me and my sister? We had the same shitty dad, were raised in the same tiny flat in the slums, ate the same food and went to the same public primary school. The pressure of being the first-born played a role, for sure. But there’s much more to it. Much more that I don’t know if I will ever find out. Me and my siblings all took different paths. They know more about me than I will ever know about all of them combined. Some oldest brother I am.

Me and my siblings don’t look alike. It’s like life’s way of saying “You will grow to be complete strangers to each other.” And we are. And we simply don’t seem to care. That’s the Hernández way. Born with no deep emotional connections. Detached from this world and the people around us.

I wonder what it feels like to have a family. The normalized, caring and loving family I grew up seeing on tv and at my friends’. Would I have become a completely different person if I had it? Would that person be better than me? He probably would be. And he most certainly wouldn’t be asking himself these fucking questions from his cold flat in Denmark