Instructions I Never Received

Not the polite kind people give you. The ones that say things like take your time or stay strong. I mean real instructions. Step by step. Like the ones that come with furniture, except no parts are missing and nothing ends up crooked.

I looked for them everywhere after my sister died.

Hospitals don’t have them. Neither do funerals. People just hug you and whisper like you’ve become fragile overnight.

My sister hated instructions. She used to say they were just rules written by people who survived the mistake first. She died at twenty-nine, which means she didn’t survive this one.

I found her notebook while cleaning out her apartment. It was thin, cheap, and half-empty. The first page read:

Things I should probably figure out.

The list stopped after three items.

How to say no without apologizing

How to leave before it hurts

What to do if I disappear

That last one stayed with me.

Weeks passed. Life continued in a way that felt insulting. The world didn’t slow down. Trains still ran on time. Cafés still opened in the morning. People still laughed too loudly.

I started imagining my sister walking beside me, pointing things out. She would’ve hated how serious I’d become. She liked chaos. Liked asking questions that made people uncomfortable.

One night, I dreamed she left me a voicemail.

“You’re doing it wrong,” she said.

When I woke up, my phone was silent.

I tried to remember the sound of her voice without distorting it. Memory is unreliable that way. It edits things without permission.

I went back to her apartment one last time before handing in the keys. The place was empty now, except for dust and the smell of old books. I sat on the floor and opened the notebook again.

This time, I turned to the last page.

There was new writing I hadn’t noticed before.

If you’re reading this, I didn’t disappear. I just stopped explaining myself.

My chest tightened. Anger followed quickly after. She didn’t get to stop explaining. Not to me.

I carried that notebook everywhere for a while. Read it when the nights felt too long. Pretended she was still leaving messages between the lines.

Slowly, something shifted.

I stopped waiting for instructions.

I learned that grief doesn’t move in straight lines. That some days feel normal until they don’t. That loving someone doesn’t end when they leave. It just changes shape.

Months later, I added my own list to the notebook.

Things I learned without asking:

Silence can be loud

Leaving isn’t always a choice

Some instructions are written after the fact

I don’t know if I believe everything happens for a reason. My sister wouldn’t have. But I do believe this:

Not all disappearances are empty.

Some leave behind enough words to last a lifetime.