This is how it feels to love your sister:

You can't bear to stay awake because your days are filled with empty sighs and staring at the lifeless dolls on your shelves, and no matter how hard you pretend, they will never be your friends. But you can't bear to sleep, either; your nights are filled with memories of that one terrible mistake, that costly misuse of your power, and the terrible, terrible fear that it could happen again, only no amount of troll-magic would be able to bring her back now that your power's grown with your years.

You're cold. You must be. You tell her to go away because you don't know what else to say; how do you apologize for something she can't even remember?

How do you mend something everyone's determined to ignore?

You didn't understand it at first, the way Mother and Father looked at you. The sadness in their eyes and the strange, awful emotion that accompanied that sadness. You didn't understand why the hugs, the kisses, the love simply stopped after the accident. You were only eight. Perhaps I'm still in trouble, your young mind thought, and looked forward to the day when that trouble would pass.

You are cold because you don't remember how it feels to be warm in their arms. You've grown up; you know full well what it was in their eyes, because it now dwells in your heart and whispers to you just how odd unnatural dangerous unsafe unloveable you are when you can't find anything to distract yourself. It bleeds out of your eyes and freezes mid-fall to the floor as you create your own private blizzard in your bedroom.

You no longer need anyone else to tell you what a monster you are, because you tell yourself every moment of every day. So you'll always remember how important it is to control your power.

So you'll always know why you must keep Anna at a distance, when all you want is to give in to her demands and play with her as a sister should.

And if this is how it will always feel to love, then you dream of the day when you will finally grow so cold that the pain will not pierce through your frozen numbness. Perhaps you will turn to ice and melt away, disappearing as winter always does in spring. To disappear would be a great relief... both to yourself, and to everyone you threaten by simply existing...

(But Anna would miss you, more than she already does; could you really hurt her like that?)

And so you conceal, don't feel, don't let them know how you cry at night because you haven't touched your own parents in so long and you pine after the world you once looked forward to being part of and you die a little inside each time you think of all that could go wrong if you lose one ounce of control.

This is how it feels to love your sister, because you've forgotten how to love yourself.