The first time I met my sister I thought she was too short to be related to me. She didn’t look like me at all, with her red-blond hair and brown eyes, as opposed to my grey-green ones. I tried pointing this out to my mother, and how we couldn’t possibly be related to the girl standing so nervously in front of us, but she chose not to listen to me. Instead, she just poured out the “welcomes” and the “I hope you like our house” and the “did you have a nice flight?”, like the smell of one of those lavender scented soaps, that no matter how hard you wash your hands after you used it, you can never get rid of.
We got into the car, and my mother was still smiling with her teeth all exposed, as if they were some pricey jewelry she needed to point out our family could afford. I didn’t look at my sister all the way from the airport gate were we picked her up to our violet Volkswagen parked on the left side of the airport parking-lot. I knew she was there, walking besides me with her feet dragging underneath her, and that was enough for the time being. There was only so much I could take.
My father wasn’t even at home waiting for us. He was at work. Somehow he couldn’t even find the time to come meet the daughter he had just recently admitted to the family that he had. I could feel her next to me, standing in the hallway, reaching out with her heart to every dark corner, under every couch, behind every book-shelf, trying to find some trace of the love of a father she had never had. Trying desperately to find some kind of solace, some kind of sign that would shake her to the very core of her miserable being and scream at her until her stubborn heart would understand: There are parents who love their children. Fathers do exist.
I didn’t find out until later that she had never had a real home. My mother told me she was raised by her mother’s parents, and that her mother had left very soon after leaving her there. After my mom told me this, I could almost smell the moth balls and old pillow cases on her. I didn’t blame her for being as quiet as she was.
We got used to her pretty fast. I think our hearts were also searching for something, maybe a light that could make us see our true selves. We were also searching, desperately searching for something we didn’t even know we needed. And she was it. She was what we needed.
My resentment towards her disappeared as quickly as her arrival. Before I knew it, love had leaked into the darkest corners of my insides, and I couldn’t deny her any longer. She was my dearest sister, and I finally understood that without her none of us would be able to make it. We had been lost for so long, for so long in these screaming woods, and her helping hand had been the only thing that had been able to pull us out.
After a while, my sister started getting sick. We didn’t know what it was, and truthfully, I think none of us wanted to see it. We didn’t want to admit her being sick, and we didn’t want to admit that we might loose her. That maybe it was our fault. That maybe she should have never come.
It never crossed our minds that we might not have had anything to do with it.
The white jackets came and examined her. They came and poked her with thermometers and asked her if her chest hurt and if her head hurt and if it hurt if I poked you there sweetie.
They didn’t realize the real problem was in her eyes.
And so they all soon left, shaking their heads and clicking their silver pens, wishing my father good luck and pointing out that they couldn’t find anything clinically wrong with her.
They didn’t realize that no human being possible could carry so much sadness it their eyes.
So we held my sisters hand and stoked her hair and tried to remember what it was like before she came, before she saved us. The lives we led, the emptiness that haunted the hallways of our house, the constant searching for something that didn’t exist. The sadness, that was now lodged inside my little sister. The sadness that she had taken from us and put into her; the sadness she had absorbed, absorbed for us, for us! We couldn’t even name the reasons our hearts were broken, and yet here she was, collecting them in her basket and stowing them away in the cupboards of her insides. And those cupboards had stated filling up, of course they had, and they soon reached the very, very top, and even sooner they stared to overflow and leak out through her eyes, and still her collection grew, oh, the pride of the family.
We sat down next to her bed and moaned her sickness.
And after she died, we sat next to her empty bed and moaned her passing.
She had gone and left us forever, all alone and to ourselves. We were back into those screeching woods. And so lost, our scratched eyes now blind, we sat by her bed and moaned, moaned for the next little girl to come and save us from ourselves.
