She commands me not to leave yet. Stay at the party with her, with dad. She glazes my retreating figure with blown-glass eyes and her voice breaks over her knee when she calls my name. There is only this night, she entreats: this, then when again? December? When I’ll return with my fixations wrapped around some fable of a life that excludes family and about which I boast, I brag, I brandish. I wasn’t there last Christmas, she provides. Nor ever when our game of telephone tag ends; through the wire she must listen to my exaltations of a windswept romance that to her is just babble in ignorant jargon. It’s like she’s telling me I chose to get older when I could have remained a kid with her, always.
But wouldn’t that have been wonderful? She and I lounging catlike on our yellow sectional, pawing at some air of mutual annoyance yet sharing the unfolding of our day in furtive harmony. Hopscotching each other from room to room, seeking space but fearing loneliness, knowing somehow the privilege of being fed up with your sister. We floated out from feuds as quick as July clouds turn to hail. Idling in the kitchen over torn bread and slapdash morsels just to spend time. Falling asleep before afternoon reruns. Keeping each other safe on walks across the neighbourhood while the alleyways’ rabbits bolted at our singsong gibberish. Laughing at silent conveyances so foreign to anyone else we received admonishment many times over for our rudeness, which only served to stoke our twin fires to heights that singed chaperoning firs, bronzed skies that never aged. Looking up to those moons we felt like spirits of a picture book, like mirrored looping letters bound firmly by the spine and parted only by the opening of the pages.
Sadness slips over her cheeks and falls to the lake-damp grass. Sadness and anger, working together in ways that the two of us cannot. She writhes in trying to find better words to employ for the loss that shadows over her, has been darkening her figure for months now. And I never knew; spoiled by firstborn impunity and given the two-handed boost at my shoulder blades which sent me west, while she stayed at the foot of my childhood bed sensing it grow colder each day. I didn’t even look back to find her, she says. Well, I say, the earth is an ellipse and gravity tugs harder at different points in its belly and I’m sorry I got stuck where I am trying to be big, be my own, and now there’s a fortune of reason that’s keeping me planted and I get water here where I am I get love and I can offer it and why don’t you ever visit me don’t you think I miss you all the time and it can’t be all on me or is it just that way because, because. She looks around the lawn to field the incoming party guests, to make sure they don’t perforate the bubble. We deny a stumbling inquirer in tandem and for a second sympathize miserably as we watch him retreat. She has words for me, yet. She starts once more to stutter through her sorrow and I feel the rattling in her spine make its way over to mine. Neither one of us wants to plunge into this place. It’s just like we’re in snowsuits again, wedged both in the barrel of the plastic toboggan, and before us is the slope that will swallow us whole right as our stomachs reach our throats.