“Could I have killed her?” You have asked.
The policewoman’s eyes will widen so briefly it’s imperceptible - maybe they didn’t at all - “No.”
You are here, sitting on the edge of a backyard pool, feet in the water, cigarette in hand, on a warm, sunny Texas day in November. The scene reads tranquil, but it is not.
Two hours ago, you found her body, and you feel the coldness overtake you, dissociating from your own body as you would when a child - wait, still are a child - and eager to be anywhere else. The details of today - the way the light hit her body as she slumped at the desk, the yellow light of the hallway as you ran down the stairs, the quiet malaise of the EMTs’ arrival, already aware she is dead. These details will never leave you. You don’t know that yet.
You are twenty. She was days from 21. She was our big sister by sorority only, but she had seemed familiar immediately. You idolized her, including her insatiable anorexia, her runs that left her on the sidewalk gasping as her pacemaker warned her it was all too little and too much, her kindness that masked a profound sadness. I today can hear what you had so recently heard, her proclaiming “Little Sis!” whenever she saw you, and her insistence on always being cheerful.
When she called you, the summer before this day, to tell you of her father’s death, you listened and said all those lines you thought adults said to one another in loss. You were eager, though, to return inside to the house party you were hosting, and you meagerly rushed her thoughts along as your eyes darted to the crowd of high school ex-boyfriends and future ex-friends.
Once, when she bought you both vodka, you asked where she’d gotten the ID. “My sister,” she replied. When you asked where her sister is now, she said only “New York.” You do not know but I do now that this sister, so pretty even in a driver’s license, was by then buried in New York.
This day has changed you, abruptly, and will continue to mold you over the unfolding decades, a deeply shaded swipe in the watercolor of your life that can only be diffused with more work and water.
I am here, you twice your age, and I have much and not enough to say to you.
The hours, days, weeks, months, years of these 20s will see you flee from this city, in the early hours and without saying goodbye to housemates who you know are not friends, save one who truly is. You will return to this city, over and over, in the coming years, finally stopping with the end of your 20s, never reaching the point of peace.
You will chase others’ sadness; you will swallow your own along with barrels of alcohol that don’t dilute your carried horror. You will sometimes traumatize others with your own hurt - describing how you would write letters to everyone before your suicide, so that they would know it was not their fault, lashing out when confronted with even the threat of disloyalty.
First you will rush to Chicago, thinking a ‘blank slate.’ But blankness, you will learn, will mean time alone with your mind. This is not what you want. You will try and fail to distract yourself by any means necessary, but when your boss senses you are vulnerable and begins to put his hands on your body, you will flee again. Coming home to St. Louis, where your home has been demolished. You think the city itself will be your home, and for a time this will give you the comfort you need. You will leave and return here repeatedly, buying and selling properties, creating and dismantling homes. Home for you, for us, is restlessness itself.
You will seek men who find you useful, and you will mistake your using for receiving love. You will avoid men whose purpose seems genuine - fearful both that they will see you have deceived them and that they are deceiving you.
You will wonder why friends desert you after this loss, and, later, after your brother’s death. Friends you thought were constants will become emotionally violent memories. And you will use those memories to inflict pain on yourself that you will not allow the salve of true friends to heal.
Angelus Novus - the angel of history - will become your mascot. You will carry that image of a panicked angel, back to the future, watching horrors of the past, all the way to today. It reminds you of you.
In your 30s you will aim to reclaim without knowing what you’ve lost. You will walk overnight through cities to make others aware of suicide prevention, though you will feel fraudulent as someone who failed to prevent. Eventually, you will recognize that thinking you could have killed her or prevented her own killing is an act of selfishness. Who are you to decide the life of another? You will cease all that walking, no longer sure of what you believe.
You will find betrayal from your high school friends after your brother’s death, who find you more useful for throwing parties to celebrate their lives and less so when the task at hand is supporting you in an ugly time, and you will find betrayal of your brother by you and others in executing his estate. You will be years feeling empowered and enfeebled by knowing now what to call the memories and feelings of the suffering your brother and you shared, so young, and about which you never spoke.
You will speak it. It will destroy some relationships while strengthening others, and you will realize that owning all of these terrors is the only way to manage them. To know them deeply, to tame them, and to be able to set them back in their cages when needed.
You will retreat West, you will write her name and your brother’s name on a rock on top of a mountain and think you can ceremoniously leave them both there. You will stand by their graves and weep, and think that this is the end of each sad story. You will speak openly of her suicide and his overdose and think this is enough, that you need not disclose your own struggles. In all of these things and in many others: you will be wrong.
Sometimes, your spirituality will frighten you. A psychic who enters your world via an acquaintance who knows nothing of your losses will tell you of a young woman who claims to be your big sister. This will send you post haste to Church, where you will pray fearful thanks for that moment. Another will land on you and your mother, in a crowded room, and describe the darkness of your brother’s feet, when he was found by your parents after his death. These will bring you careful, small signs of the energy out there.
olace.
It will be years more of drowning in drink and distracting yourself before you are finally able, in the midst of pandemonia worldwide, to recognize your inability to walk and your inability to think and your inability to drink as the time you can decide whether or not this is your full life’s story.
You will decide it is not.
And at all times from then to the now now, you will decide this again. You will keep making the same decision. And for your sake and mine, I hope that we always will.
You will sit, no, now I sit on the floor in the early hours of days with our dogs, the ones all our yous long wanted and who I now have. I run my fingers through their fur and marvel at the trust in their eyes and the simple honesty of their feelings. I try to learn to be a bit like that.
We are still learning from that day’s trauma; the trauma that the apology in her suicide note did little to dissuade. A time ago I learned of the Bolton Strid, a wide river that turns from horizontal to vertical, with no indication of its depth after the turn. I think we have aspired to hide our pain like that. The mistake in that thinking is to imagine the depth ceases to exist because it is hidden below.
I am not ashamed of you or of what all our yous will do and, for me, have done in the years it took you to be me.
I am not who you thought this me would be. The losses and gains are not what you expected, could you have expected.
I do not wish to take away your pain. I do not regret all the yous between you and me. Because I am - at last - proud of me. And I could not have gotten here without you being there, feet in the water, eyes on the sky, beginning the battle. I am proud of you. I love you. I love me.
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