body.
You glided across floors and let the music take you to places I
Katherine
Carmen
Isabel
! out of view, the lighthouse being the last thing that would be swallowed
I dont remember a lot of things from my childhood. I remember our
mother, beautiful and uptight and fearful of the world. I remember our
father, always forgetting our birthdays. I remember our little sister,
giving our help the hardest of times. I remember that home, our house,
the cracks in the mustard coloured paint on the walls. We never really
liked mustard, but it stayed.
I could never forget you. You were, in the eyes of a child, perfection. Sun
kissed and beautiful, you were loved by many for your infectious energy
and fire. I was doe-eyed and pale and moved timidly in my peculiar
could not go. I watched in admiration at they way your limbs extended
with the sweet, long notes. Dancing, among many others, was one of
those things I could not do, yet you could. Among two sisters, there would
always be the watcher and the dancer.
I was your watcher and I remember following you everywhere. From the
breakfast table to late nights at the beach, I was by your side. I became
an extension of you, an oddity compared to the vibrant package that
you were. You breezed along, and I limped onwards.
In many ways, I was not like you and you were not like me. We did not
match, despite wearing the same clothes that our mother bought for us. It
was only when we spoke that we were unidentifiable. I heard you in me
always. I was an echo of your sound.
We grew up by the beach, with horses and dogs as best friends. On
weekends we sailed to different islands and we lay on the shore as the
current ate us up and the waves spat us back on the sand. We
worshipped the sun and, went it left us, we warmed ourselves up by
forming a pile of wet bodies, swimsuits, and sandy feet. These were our
best days together.
Each time we would leave, we laid our backs on the hard, white wood
that made up our boat. We would watch as the islands silhouette faded
up by the horizon. I would glance at us, at you, and then back out to the
tiny line that was once the endless stretch of white sands. You would get
up and tell us that we couldnt just sit there and do nothing. You were our
boss, our lighthouse. I would never deny you. I was the sand.
Even as the island was no longer in sight, we would still face its side of
the ocean. We glanced back and forth between where the island used
to be, and you. We were all under both of your spells, unable to go on
or let go.
There is this memory we both share. We were children locked away in a
room, not taking time, not enforcing rules. None of us could count or tell
differences. I was running after you like all our friends were. It seemed
like it was always like this, and for a time it seemed like it would always
be like this. You moved and I followed. You moved and we all followed
after you.
A friend, much bigger and older than either of us, threw a pillow at you
and even if it was not meant to hurt, I ran to you and gathered the only
courage in me to tell him to stop. I looked at you, and you stood up
beside him. You reacted violently against my reaction to help you and in
that moment my heart fell to the ground. I was dismembered, and ever
since then I carried that pain with me.
It hurt to me be around you because you became a reminder of that
painfully embarrassing experience of learning that it is not good to love
too much. Something in me broke, so I tried to blame you, and this gave
life to the notion, this solipsistic idea, that I convinced myself of. I told
myself that I wasnt meant to live, but God saved me from the terrible
fate of dying young. Because one cannot give without taking, he took
the pain I was supposed to experience and spread out this great
suffering for all the numbered days of my existence. Of course, it was
my older sister that became my punisher, giving me what I thought I
deserved. This secret, was something I had to relive every night in our
mothers bed, as I cried and felt entrapped and alone as a helpless kid,
forever.
You were older and more capable of doing things people expected
both of us to do. You were the better version and I was always going to
be second, always the younger child. You were right, even when you
werent. I only followed after you, so it was always my fault.
But we grew up and grew apart. We no longer had to share friends or
clothes. We saw less of the islands and spent more time in the city. I
started liking different things, you started receiving attention from boys,
and we learned that sometimes, you dont have to like who you live with.
We reached that age where we started to care more about how people
saw us. Whenever we were both introduced to new people, a tension
arose. They would notice how grown up we were, how we were both
turning out to be pretty young ladies. Mother would sometimes tell them
that it didnt matter, for she was still the most beautiful one. It was true.
They all said you look more like mom. I did not, and you didnt make me
forget this. Yet, this was not enough for you. I was two years younger yet
a couple of inches taller. You started to notice the extra curves on your
waist, and you started to notice the lack in mine. I was shamed for being
skinny. You fed me jealousy and I would shove it back to you. These
were our worse days.
A few years into high school, our mother took you and I to a pizza
parlour back in our home town. While waiting for our pizza to come, I
got the weirdest looks from you sitting across me in our booth. This is
when you told me. You told me we had another sister. You told me our
dad had not only three daughters, but four. You kept on telling me but I
did not understand. How could you destroy my father like that? Did he
know her birthday? Did you even care for how I felt? Did he ever think
of her at all? I looked at my side of the booth. I looked at the blown-up
photographs of families on the wall having a great time. I kept on
looking but I did not see my dad. I saw you. The waiter finally comes
with our meal and he is looking at me. Pizza parlours are happy places.
Good pizza is supposed to bring families together. Yet there I was, in
tears. You showed me that people are not who we think they are.
Then, not long after, I showed you how our mother was not always how
we thought she was, after reading our mothers texts to someone who
was not our father. She called him her rest. We clutched her phone (the
chest of her dirty deeds; the object of her obsession) as I clutched on to
you. We told her about all those nights at the phone, her sudden change
of tone when she would talk to him. You screamed and she denied, but
we all knew. We knew all of this, about her, about dad, yet I didnt want
to know any of it.
I forgot about your torments, our fathers past, and our mothers
cheating. I focused on everything but our family. If this was what I had, I
did not want any part of it. I did everything in my power to stay away.
But I was always a part of you.
Not for the likes of us. The train chugged on, and I grappled on the
pole closest to me. I remember how quickly my disposition changed as I
heard our grandmothers voice on the other end of the line. Engulfed by all
the mixed messages of my friends concern, cluelessness, and
nonchalantness, my phone easily became a pain to look at. I remember
trying to fight back the tears. I did not want to be a mess. I was already
failing a class.
In that moment, I just wanted to stay put. I looked around at the people in
the train with me. We were all running away from something or coming
home to someone. I didnt know why I was running to a hospital bed.
I found you there, with a pipe placed inside you, the doctors removing the
poison you allowed to get in. I think Im depressed, you managed to tell
me. You didnt say much. You trusted me to not say anything back.
Hours later, my undivided gaze towards the screen of my laptop broke as
you started struggling in the white sheets that wrapped your body. I only
had to watch you sleep, so when you woke up at that moment, I was
worried something was wrong and I wouldnt know how to help. Something
was wrong, but you saved me from the awkward panic of asking you, and
you simply asked me to talk to you. I asked you about your day, and how
you felt, even though I already knew.
The night went by fast and a tall man came in when it was morning and
switched on the lights. The fluorescent lights were so bright they illuminated
everything in the room. Your bed. The couch I was sleeping on. The secrets
that you wanted to keep. But today we would leave this place and you
would tell us why we were in there in the first place.
The tall man that called himself a doctor talked to you about what you
did, and he had on this look of complete condescension. He spit out his
words like they were stones being thrown at you. Look at the trouble you
made. Of all the days you could choose to do this. You are supposed
to be a student from the pontifical university. What a sin against God.
You looked at me and I mouthed something for you. Dont listen to him.
Room 1074 of the San Vicente Ward was our world for a weekend, and
that world, much like the one we both had to live in everyday, was our
prison. It smelled like death, I said. You disagreed, you said it smelled like
mental illness. We laughed at your situation, and I realised that despite the
dullness of everything around us, for a weekend, we were our own palace.
I could never deny you; you were my Queen.
For a long time I couldnt believe that you could love people just
because their blood ran though your veins. It shouldnt have counted. You
had to know people, understand them and respect them. So I built my
own relationships and I made space in my heart for strange boys. I have
loved and lost for countless of them. Some worshipped the ground I
walked on and others treated me like dirt. In the end, my greatest love
affair was with someone who I lied to, was scared of, hurt me physically,
tormented me emotionally, yet, was everything I wanted to be.
Maybe I love you plainly because you are my older sister. It may not be
grand or conventional, but it is real.