bent

Tell me a story; whisper your greatest failures, your deepest horrors.

I’ve become Switzerland—neutral.

My mother and I barrel down a terribly paved highway toward the treatment centre as I shield my eyes from the sun. The irony of being desperately hungover the first time I visit my sister in rehab is not lost on me, but I’m not sure it’s a joke to be shared.

Vigorous piano floats through the speakers—Elton John—while my mother blows cigarette smoke out the window. She’s been playing “Funeral for a Friend” repeatedly, and I don’t ask her to stop. She throws the cigarette and clears her throat. This woman I’ve only known to be self-assured, a constant source of security who gives everything and asks for so little, asking for reassurance of her own.

“Your childhood—was there something we should have done differently? Something we can do differently? Were we good enough?”

Not without its complications but no, no, and yes.

I don’t think she hears me. Her hair lands in her mouth while her window closes, a tear rolls down her cheek and she doesn’t try all that hard to hide it. She’s already decided the hundreds of ways she’s a terrible mother. She’s made up her mind about how this is her fault and I’ve yet to find a word in any language to bring comfort to that.

I don’t really know how to be her child anymore.

When they first hand me the pamphlet, my mother is so calm. She’s never been fussy, just a doer and a problem solver. Now, a woman with a problem and a solution—why should we possibly worry? But I do, consistently, constantly.

And she must’ve too. It’s why she seems eerily resigned when she delivers the news that my sister will be home early. She’s being expelled from treatment. Under the devastation, I’m nearly impressed that under such strict monitoring she’s still found a way to score.

Months later, when I’m 21, maybe 22, I have to call my parents to tell them I found their daughter and I can’t get her to breathe. An hour later, I’m standing in the emergency room while my parents are on the highway a few hours away.

She’s in a bed, unconscious, tubes in places that I don't want to see. And because I’m not that unflinching, I leave the room. The sliding doors give way to a chilly January evening and her boyfriend rushes in, a towering mass in black. Before I can say a word, he throws his hands up in anger, maybe confusion. When his eyes land on me, he looks so angry that for a moment, I feel I’ve done something wrong. 

He follows closely behind while I go outside to take a call, suffocating even in the open air. When I hang up, he tells me everything. It falls out like tens of secrets he never wanted to keep. He fills in the blanks of the day, the week, months, and I hear things about my sister that I never wanted to know.

When he’s done, I tell him he needs to leave her.

He looks at me, this nearly forty-year-old man, with insistent eyes and refuses.

“You can’t fix her,” I tell him. “She’s not a real person right now. She’s barely a person at all.”

He wipes at his eyes, snot and childlike tears dripping as he asks me questions, leaning on me while I pretend I’m not twenty-fucking-one, wondering how the fuck we ended up here shivering outside hospital doors, “You need to leave her.”

After four years together, he does. I feel that I’ve betrayed my sister. I also feel that I don’t have a sister.

I leave without glancing at her a second time when my parents arrive, so thoroughly exhausted it feels like they're moving too slowly. None of this looks like my family. These are two fractured people that I don’t know. The woman in the hospital bed is not a person I know because really, the last time I knew her, she was just a girl. 

That night, I sit in the living room of my best friend’s house.

“I just want her to die.”

It bounces off the cream white walls of their polished home. They look at me, horrified, “You don’t mean that.”

And I feel bad, I do, not because I thought it or meant it, but because they heard it. Guilt pings around inside me while I look into their eyes. It’s not the world I want them to live in, where people say those things about someone they love.

Why should they know that horror?

Why should they know how to talk about it? Why should they have to have these conversations?

They shouldn’t.

And they don’t.

Everyone apologizes, always.

I’m on a date. She asks, as most people do, if I have siblings. I tell her I have a sister— which often feels like a strange, foreign word in my mouth. She pries, not because she’s genuinely curious, not because it will change whether the lines and curves of my face appeal to her, but because this is a date, and that is what you do.

It’s polite.

It doesn’t feel polite when I tell the truth.

Her beer settles loudly onto the table threatening to slosh over the edges as she mutters apologies. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I look up into the sympathetic curve of her lips, the worried set of her eyebrow and I want to ask her why? Why shouldn’t she have asked?

Because she doesn’t want to know?

Because she doesn’t think I want to talk about it?

I want to scream about it.

We talk about her brother and his new baby instead.

The only people I can talk to in a way that makes any sense to me are the only people I don’t want to talk to about it. I wish for parents who will give me a hard time about if and when I’ll get married or have babies.

I quit the job I went to college for because I can’t focus, and I feel like a failure.

I stop sleeping and I stop feeling most things until one day, I feel everything. And it doesn’t stop and it snowballs and becomes an avalanche until I can’t function at all. I forget to stop driving to work and end up hours away.

I break down in my doctor’s office— “I think I’m fucking losing it?”— and I feel so horrified and ashamed when he asks if I’m sure I’m not a risk to myself. I walk out with the same prescription that’s been sitting on my mother's vanity for 26 years.

I start a relationship that seems, in some way, to be beautiful but kind of isn’t. We fall apart, we decide moving several hours away together will solve it. Eventually, she does and I don’t.

I tell my parents about almost none of it. Not the mental health diagnoses, not the breakup or the move that suddenly isn’t one. It’s not because I don’t want to but because I’m not sure I can take another sentence cut short by thoughts of her.

“I feel so sorry for you sometimes,” my mother says one morning. She’s not looking at me. She’s facing the window, mumbling into her coffee cup. “She just took up so much space, you know?” She put the mug down but never looked at me, “Always this wheel that kept falling off or getting bent, and we were always chasing after her or trying to have her fixed and you, well you always had to just keep going. The little engine that could.”

I want to ask her what else I was supposed to do?

Who else am I supposed to be?

I haven’t felt like someone's child in years. We’ve just become these three people standing shoulder to shoulder, no one any more certain than the other.

Emotions are anything but constant.

I’ve loved my sister and hated her.

I’ve hated her while I’ve loved her.

I’ve blamed her and absolved her.

The easiest conversations I have are with her because she’s the only one willing to admit that she doesn’t know what the fuck to say or how to say it. So, we almost never talk about it. When we do, it’s vague.

She calls me once from an unknown number. I haven’t seen her in weeks, maybe months. The silence she leaves after I answer is so long anyone else would’ve hung up.

“Are you mad at me?” She sounds so small.

“I’m not mad,” my chest tightens as I try to keep tears down, because I know if I cry, I’ll lose her. She can’t cope with the guilt. “I’m confused.”

“It just happened.”

“I know.”

I don’t know.

I understand the things that happened to us. I know how it feels to believe you’re too splintered to be whole—that what’s broken is too far gone to be fixed. But we’re different, her and I. She boils over and I simmer, unable to reach the near-relief of fever.

After the hospital, one time or another, I silently refuse to see her. Everything is awful and hopeless and unfair and broken. I’m often a person I don’t care to be. I’m graceless and angry, sometimes entirely absent.

When I do see her, I plan to be angry. I want to hit her like I did the day she turned blue on that living room floor.

I’m hurt and cracked, my edges are worn, and I need someone to blame for being in pain—for being in a life that doesn’t feel like mine.

But there she is, and she’s so thin and her eyes are so cloudy with drugs to help with the withdrawals—ironic.

She moves in a way I’ve never seen. We’ve always had a magnetic repulsion, never getting too close. But so quickly, she hugs me.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” she whispers, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I do love you.”

She means every word of it.

But it could happen again and again—it already has. She’d still be sorry, she’d still love us.

It doesn’t make us exempt.

Is that unsatisfying?

I’m sorry.

I don’t get to rewrite the ending.