My sister got engaged last fall and it's been... interesting. Planning is in full gear and I don't know. It's just strange adjusting to the idea that she's engaged/getting married. When I think of this sister, I see myself in this moment when I was a teenager:
These big crunchy brown maple leaves blow right in front of me.
I adjust my back pack and take a couple of steps off the sidewalk and into the street.
There is this huge bang.
Like a car back firing.
I stop. I look all around me, and I don't see anyone. All I can hear is the wind. I can feel it on my skin. Like a blanket it envelopes me.
I take a couple more steps diagonally across the street to my house and I hear it again:
BANG.
I stop.
My whole body just cringes.
It's cold.
I look up the street, looking for the source, but I'm the only one outside. The bus is gone, no one is on the street. The noise seemed like it came from behind the house or from below, but I can't tell where.
I just stand there.
It feels like an eternity.
The wind blows.
The leaves go by.
Finally I lift my feet and walk to the front door.
I push it open and the chimes on the back of the door sing as I slam it shut. I throw my bag down, like I always did, and go about my business.
My sister is in her room, being annoying. As she always was. She was always in there, with the door shut; always mean to me. If she wasn't yelling at me, she was ignoring me. That's all she ever did. Lock me out of the house, punch me in the arm, hide my stuff; that is the story of our entire relationship. There is an 8 year age gap and we have never exactly been close.
I don't think about it again.
Until about ten or twelve years later. When my sister was going through a hard time, trying to start recovering from an addiction. She had gotten into trouble, and this report on her life had been written.
Our whole family had come down to Southern California to support her and we were all at the house, on my dad's back patio passing around this big 50 page report that had been written on her life. My brother says, "Did you read she tried to shoot herself? What was up with that?!" Or something.
My heart stopped cold. "What." It wasn't even a question. I just... knew.
"Yeah, she shot holes in the floor. Are the holes here? Did anyone look for them?" My siblings handed me the report and wandered off to look for the "holes" and left me on the patio in my dad's porch swing, surrounded by my dad's beloved tropical begonia plants. And this... bomb in my hand.
And I started flipping pages. And there it was.
She had gotten a gun. And she didn't know how to use it. And she was going to kill herself. She was done; done with life. She had had a bad relationship with some guy I'd never heard of and she'd decided to shoot herself so she'd gotten a gone from someone, somewhere. But she couldn't figure out how to use it. All she had managed to do was "shoot two holes in the floor of her bedroom floor when she heard her little sister come home from school," and she realized... I realized,
I, Emily at this moment, realized why suicide was a selfish act.
In this report it said she was standing in her bedroom with the gun in her hand, and she had just fired these two rounds into her bedroom floor trying to shoot herself in the head, and she heard me walk through that front door; she heard the chimes sing on the back of our front door, and she realized if she did this, that I would be the one to find her body. And that I would have to deal with that.
And she stopped.
And she put the gun down.
And she walked away.
She was selfless, in that moment. By choosing not to do it. She protected my childhood by choosing not to do it. By choosing to continue her own suffering, which was so awful, she had only moments before been ready to spray the insides of her cranium all over her bedroom walls- she was instantly paused by that reminder. Emily. Me. A child. I would find her body. She couldn't do it. Because of me. Me. It is the most loving, selfless thing she has ever done for me.
I sat on that patio and I cried, and cried and cried. Because I remembered. I knew that day. I knew that moment. I stood in the street, and I saw the leaves blow by and I heard her fire those shots into the floor. And I am haunted by it. And she has no idea. I never told her. She wasn't there the day we all read the report and we never talked about it. I think it would upset her to talk about it now, but I wish I could.
Every time she emails me about the wedding, this is what I think about.
Standing in the street.
Feeling the wind on my skin.
Listening to my sister shoot a gun into her bedroom floor.
We probably will never be as close as we were that day. But I love her.
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