The last time I was here in Dallas, and the last time I saw everyone, was during that horrendous week of planning and attending my sister’s funeral. Everywhere is loss, everywhere I look. It is harder than I thought it would be. I’m trying to be positive and make new memories, or remember the good ones, but the combination of being away so long, and having the most recent memory be so terrible, has been too much at times.
I stay up all night, jet lagged and exhausted, and ruminate about death. I listen to sad songs and look through pictures to make myself feel worse, because I know I won’t feel better anyway. I know I just got here, and I know it will eventually get better, but right now, as I sit here, I’m just not capable of being optimistic on this topic, and it’s all I have in the back of my brain since I got here.
I hate that she isn’t here. I hate it. It fills me with rage that she is not one of the people I get to visit, but then the rage goes away and all that is left is sadness. Everything is a story, a memory, a feeling, a hurt.
I drive down 75 and remember exiting the highway, going to my father’s house, and falling out of the passenger door and scrambling to hold the edges against me while I screamed and cried, sitting on the curb, parked in front of the house.
I drive by the restaurants where she worked, waiting tables and bartending and being so charming and sunny that no one knew to be worried.
I come to my friend’s house and lay on the couch and remember my cousin Melanie and I, destroyed with grief and exhaustion, stretched out with burning eyes and numb heads from sobbing, begging Bobby to please fix the powerpoint, it’s 2 a.m. and we need it for the funeral tomorrow. The music won’t sync. The pictures don’t fade. It won’t export. Why can’t we make this perfect for her? It has to be perfect.
I’m in the bathroom in that same house and remember putting on the borrowed blue skirt, and the shirt with the birds, and Brooke comes in and tells me I look beautiful. I remember that later I’m sitting on the bird shit covered steps of the funeral home crying my eyes out and I feel bad because I borrowed Brooke’s skirt but I just truly cannot move and I just have to sit in shit and cry.
I remember the awful after get together at the house we no longer have. I remember how the first time I met my sweet friend’s baby girl I was covered in tears and so sad that when that child leaned warm into me, my stomach was cold and empty and I couldn’t feel any joy.
I remember picking up my sister’s ashes. The box, white, larger than I thought it really needed to be, sitting so loud on the edge of my father’s fireplace. I picked it up and the marble inside rocked to make its weight known and I wanted to drop it and run because I thought for sure I would vomit.
I remember driving to Austin, first with the box placed in the passenger seat, then, after pulling over, it was in the back seat, and finally, tearfully, apologetically, at a rest stop I pulled over one last time and howling “I’m so sorry, I just can’t” I put the box in the trunk. I drove the rest of the way in horror at how awful I was to put the ashes of my baby sister in the trunk.
I just remember and remember and it all opens up again and I am an enormous unfolding of raw red and the tears burn salt in all those open places and I feel like I am falling apart from the center again. I am reminded that no matter how far I go in this world I can’t go around fast enough to come back to the place where she is.
It’s not about denial. Denial didn’t leave me sprawled on my bed in the hostel in Greece on that first Christmas, screaming her name into a pillow so that no one could hear. Denial didn’t have me on the floor in Albania, staring at the ceiling, because the molding around the light fixture looked like a sunflower and it reminded me of the flowers at her funeral. Denial didn’t make me physically ache with a pain of regret when all those tiny little brown headed girls in my class would pile on my lap. Denial didn’t wake me crying, or panting in fear, or crushed in an anxiety attack.
I have known very well and all too deeply that she was gone. But I was gone from the place where the leaving happened. I wasn’t standing in the place where she went when she left. I am now. I feel the way she left like a slap in my face, a never ending impact that says HERE! HERE! It happened HERE! I imagine things about HERE. I feel sick with my imagination.
I miss my sister every day, and I miss her even more when I find myself in the place where she was last. I feel like I am right back in that spot I was when Bobby had to carry me out of her funeral.
I feel like I have never moved a day past seeing the way my cousin’s chin trembled as she stood gripping the banisters of the pulpit, swallowing down God knows what kind of desired wails, starting and stopping three times, until she could open her mouth and sing the most beautiful thing I think I’ve ever heard on the worst day of my life. I see her hair in a braid shining in a shaft of light and that white dress.
I remember in my body the palpable rising feeling of yes please, you can, please, you can, breath holding tension as the entire room willed her to be able to do it. And she did, and on the last note she folded like a bird and walked white as her dress back to her seat with her throat convulsing and her cheeks spotted red.
What is the hardest about all of these memories is that they feel more real to me than what I see in all these pictures of me with my sister. It’s as though that day she left casts a shadow longer than the 25 years she was here. I don’t understand how that works. It seems like an unnecessary cruelty on top of everything else. I don’t understand how I can’t push through a single day and embrace all the thousands of days we had before that.
We had years in this city and I keep circling around and around that day, that single second when she slipped away.
Originally published June 24th, 2014 on Blogger.
