The Spilling of Emptiness

Away from home in a neighbouring city, I was becoming a character worth reading about. Not yet a week had passed when my mothers voice called, dripping and hanging in an impossible balance, she had asked me to come back home. This creature that had clung to my mother’s walls, had pushed her way into the world, precisely six minutes before I came out screaming behind her, was gone. My mother had told us a story, a million times and then some. We both came out of her belly hating it here, screaming and kicking and outrageous to be alive. But then when we were put in a crib together, when we had been swaddled skin to skin, sharing warmth and wetness and life, we never made a sound.

When we were kids she used to smile, crooked teeth still white, our teachers gradually introducing us to expectations impossible to uphold. We would sit beside each other, matching pigtails tied back with ribbons, my toenails painted pink, while she always chose blue. Sitting at family dinners together, making faces at the cousins, pulling loose threads from doyles, watching as their intricate weave unravelled in our tiny, identical hands, only told apart by a small scar staining her left thumb. She had sliced it open with a pair of sharp scissors when we were seven, simply curious of what was inside her own flesh. She had stood up to show me, and nearly toppled over, giggling the whole time. Days later in hushed whispers she tried to convince me to do the same, that it made her feel as if she were a cloud, floating, for once weightless instead of confined. I had told her the sight of it disgusted me, and she never brought it up again. But I did notice new scars appear, always subtle, always conveniently tucked away under a cuff or sleeve. I think I decided it was small enough to let be, that she was simply curious, that I would know if anything was truly wrong, why would anything be wrong?

My sister had told me, when we were maybe fourteen, and she had just discovered Bikini Kill, and wanted to start a revolution with her budding breasts, that women hold a power to make pain go away. I didn’t understand, I had told her only a doctor could do that, surely not a woman. But now I’ve held a man's head in my arms, now I’ve wept alongside him, I’ve held him in me and kissed his brow; and I see what she meant to explain, what I could not understand, what she did understand nearly ten years before. With our bodies, with our words, with tender lips and distracting strokes, women give presence in the most desolate moments. The exact reason this enraged her, I’d imagine, is she had come to realize that in doing so, in fertilizing such grim land, we give ourselves away, spreading seeds of our person to grow in their yard, and our own garden becomes steadily more bleak. And for whatever reason, it’s so quickly presumed, that a responsibility is born in the presence of this power, to use it, regardless of what it takes from you. Though it is seldom a man is held accountable for any similar responsibility; still and all we are not men. And so it is embedded in our being to give ourselves away, to extinguish scary questions, to help and heal and sit where we’re told. Raise babies, and care for men, and live in the home we keep in the interest of others. Perhaps she gave too much, and the culminating loss of her finite being is what led her here.

In a world of selfish people, she was supposed to have me watching over her tipping scales, but I simply couldn’t wade through thoughts that extended so far beyond my bounds. By some callous fate, her mind spilled out, stretching and spreading like tentacles wrapping around worlds, bursting any box that tried to hold it; while mine remained easily contained, conformed to new thoughts without lingering curiosity, my fate much brighter than that fabricated cat, than my only sister. My only sister who perhaps, was never meant for this world, with a head too vast for any peripheral life. Dealt the same hand as myself, but she had run while I had hid, she had resisted while I gave in. We had traveled parallel roads, fingers intertwined across a yellow line, except hers had opened into a macrocosm of questions, and mine had shrunk to a string with a definable knot at its end. Our shared existence became divided. Still close, but on journeys so conflicting that her hand fell out of reach. Then with an insatiable craving to feel significant, I had left. Into a school four hours away, deciding her shadow was slowly suffocating me. Now, halfway home to see broken parents, surrounded by a seemingly limitless sky, an immeasurable emptiness, I can’t breathe.

My phone still bears a photo of her, as if I carry her now in my left back pocket, yet her last moments were days ago, and they passed by in solitude. Not to be found until a full day had passed, when my mother and father stumble across a rock in the floor of her apartment, slumped against a wardrobe, marked arms and cold skin, why do bad things happen. How funny it is that I now stare through a ghost on a screen, stunning beauty hidden in hollow eyes, deep enough that you could fall and sink for hours. But the depths grew darker with each dose of poison. And I had been naive enough to think it would never actually happen. Now in her death we finally meet her demons. Heroine, fentanyl. Scars from more than just sharp scissors. I picture her mind is swimming, drifting, in an ocean of a bad batch, each wave tearing through her. They came too quick, too strong, until one pulled her down to a place in which she would never kick back up. And my mind slowly surmises, she simply must have known. Too curious to have not pieced it together, knowing all along what giving could take, just how finite it all was, how infinite she had been, perhaps she had resolved to live in her head. To live floating, weightless, happier on a cloud than anywhere on earth. Just one day too late, I wish for those scissors, those blue toes. For the first time in twenty two years, I realize she isn’t there with me, and I find myself again, kicking and screaming, and alone in my wetness.