Her final year of high school was pressured, prescribed to her, from the dinner table, the letters from colleges spewing from our parents. Her fainting increased. She was visiting a hospital weekly. “Shes making her grades, she must be fine” Father would state. Shed bring home As and hide in her room. She started to write stories for classes. One in particular was about a girl starving, in America, disappearing before her parents eyes without them noticing. She won an award for it, the school applauded her, and our parents were there, at the ceremony, standing in the photograph next to the award. They never even read the story. I saw my sister as a puppet that night, and could feel the pleas for the strings to be cut. That year, the school got a new staff of counselors. She was assigned to one. She started going down to him weekly to talk. Id watch her leave her classes. No one ever seemed to question it or notice she was gone. Come January, she had a plan to swallow her Prozac. I read it in her journal. She had a date and a time for it, set. She planned her calories for the day and beside that, planned her time of death. The night came, I waited in our room for her. It was my plan to be there to witness. As I witnessed her life, I would witness her death. It was neither out of cruelty nor lack of caring for my sister that I came to that decision, to let her go. It came as a detached resignation to it all. Like I was about to watch a dried out leaf fade from sight on a river. I waited for her, curled in my bed, blocked up inside, like I had swallowed a tombstone. She entered the room close to midnight. Took the neon orange plastic bottle of chalky Prozac, emptied the pills from the bottle, crumpled them in her frail fist, and threw them out the window. She sat, like a dream image, on her bed and looked me straight in my eyes, moonlight flashing across her face, “Can I tell you a secret?“ Stunned, I nodded silent permission.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 02:09:17 +0000
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