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hello vonnie
Cosimo Galluzzi
DEAR READER

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almost home

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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Kiana Khansmith
trying on a metaphor

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Mike Driver
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

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@1000thingsaboutmysister
Cursed Image
Apologies for the lack of content recently! I’ve been bogged down in a few other projects, one of them being this - a depiction of a dream I had the day after my sister’s passing. I’m so happy with how it turned out - it’s almost exactly as I saw it back then.
Though I won’t be going with my parents to a nearby grief retreat this year, the painting will be. I haven’t decided if the accompanying essay will be yet.
When I die, a long time from now, I have a mind to find her in those caves again.
My sister owned a bracelet - a plain steel manacle with a ward against darkness etched into it.
“What Cancer Cannot Do…” it reads.
“Corrode faith,
shatter hope,
destroy peace,
silence courage,
invade the soul,
steal eternal life,
conquer the spirit,
cripple love,
kill friendship,
suppress memories.“
I own it now, in a jewelry box of my sister’s things that never sees the light of day. With rings the color of lymphoma, necklaces strung with metal prayers for health - gifts for an ailing child, things that she wore that marked her as sick.
You can find them in the gift shop at Roswell Park, on the arm of every patient there. There are different variations and colors, a rainbow of fear to pick from. The message varies, but the core of the charm remains - “Cancer cannot kill the soul.”
I don’t buy it.
On the night after her death, I dreamed of her.
We were together in a series of endless caverns that stretched in all directions. Bits of broken carnival rides stood in our way - carousel horses sticking at haphazard angles from the stone, dead lights that had once glowed with color.
She clung to me, hugging my ribs. She’d been the taller one in life. But now she was small and scared. She looked like how I remembered her, back before cancer had stopped up her throat and oozed out her back. Her hair was long and silky, the way she’d always wanted it.
And someone had chopped off her pinky finger.
I saw the stump as she held me, healed over, a simple fact to be taken as it was. A memory of past brutality. I was angry and sad. But I held her close, giving her my strength though my knees shook and I knew not what direction we were meant to head in.
We traveled through the caverns together, I trying to find a way through. The guide in darkness, the comforter in anxiety. She was always so anxious in life. I told her once that thunder was a garbage truck down the street making noise. I reassured her repeatedly, ad infinitum, that the storm would not flood the house. I hated her for it sometimes. I didn’t understand until after she was gone.
Time passed us by as though it were nothing. It was an eternity of walking in the dusky light, a slow trudge through the depths of who-knows-where. I stayed with her as long as I could, holding her tight, telling her with my body to not be scared.
At some point she slipped away from me and I wandered alone.
I woke up with tears on my face, the knowledge of what I’d seen echoing in my bones.
Cancer had taken a piece of her soul - wrenched it from her body, snapped it like a twig. She was not the person she had been any longer.
Near the end, she was terrified. In her last moments of sanity, she cried, she lashed out, she spat at the people she loved. We fought sometimes. I tried to understand. I gave her everything I could without complaint. But sometimes, the things that hurt us do not make us stronger.
A soul is a more fragile thing than can be imagined. Nothing more than a dandelion puff, a scent that dissipates with the slightest hint of wind. The truth is that they are broken and lost, damaged beyond repair all the time. Sometimes they get a chance to heal.
And then there are those whose only recourse is to sort through the pieces after their own deaths.
#37
When she died, she was wearing an orange girl scout shirt. It had pictures of the things a girl scout could be when she grew up - doctor, teacher, scientist...
The funeral home gave it back to us, neatly folded. I threw it into the bottom of my drawer for a couple years. I buried it in the bottom of a box and hid it in the attic.
It’s still up there.
#36
On this day six years ago, my sister died in our mother’s arms.
She hadn’t slept for two weeks. You could see the cancer pressing through her back, a red blotch that darkened as the days went on. She asked Mom to rub it, over and over again, to hold her, to do something, to make it stop, please --
She had been sent home to die just before Christmas. A hospital bed was moved into her bedroom, an IV stand, a slew of medication. There was a great party when she at last came home. There were relatives, friends, more food than any of us could conceivably eat. We were so happy to see her. We wanted her to be welcome, this Christmas to be the best.
No one said a word about death. We told ourselves that she would live, right up until the very end. Had we told ourselves anything else, it would have been the end of what little sanity we had left.
In those last two weeks, my sister existed and did not exist. She lay in her room most hours of the day, groaning and rolling over, trying to get comfortable in a body that would not let her. She was all skin and bones. She cried endlessly. She hallucinated visions of our grandparents welcoming her to the afterlife (they were teddy bears in the wall. Mom reasoned that they appeared like that so as not to scare her). Slowly, so gradual that I did not see the difference until it was too late, she drifted into a catatonic daze. She was unable to move on her own or form coherent sentences. Her eyes wobbled this way and that, never focusing on any one thing. Looking upon her was like looking at a different plane of reality - vibrating, indistinct, right in front of me, but so very far away.
Most days of those last two weeks, I pretended that she did not exist.
Her room was quiet and the door was always closed.
It hurt too much to see anything else.
On the day of her death, while I was at school, she was admitted to a nearby Hospice. She was the first child to ever be given a room there. Every nurse looked on us like we had a curse, like we’d brought a freak of nature into the building. A sixteen year old is not something you see everyday in a geriatric facility.
I came home to an empty house that day. I heated up some leftovers and spent the greater part of four hours pacing back and forth, unable to concentrate on anything. Around 9 or 10, my parents called me, told me where they were and begged me to come in. I told them that I had school tomorrow, that I needed to get to bed.
No, you need to come in.
They had said something to that effect.
I packed up and went out the door. It was the dead of Winter and the roads were none too forgiving. They showed me to her room and I saw my parents smiling inside. I was hugged and greeted. We told jokes. We remembered the good parts of her life.
A nurse came in to change her underwear and with a great deal of relief, we realized that we could give Lyd some privacy. That we were no longer caretakers, but loved ones. We had had no space for mourning up until then. No time to do anything but try to make her comfortable.
When we came back, the nurse was holding her feet.
Her limbs are getting cold, she had said. This means that a change is coming. Just so you’re aware.
I had thought, in the broken remnants of a mind that had nothing but hope left, that she was going to get better. For a long time I was angry that she had phrased it that way. Why hadn’t she straight up said that she was dying? Why did she give me that last cruel burst of hope?
Whatever it was that she had said, at that point, I don’t think I could’ve heard anything else. All of us were far too gone to hear a single thing about death.
I kissed her on her pale cheek and told her to have a good sleep. That was the last I saw her alive.
An hour later, she struggled to breathe as she lay in Mom’s arms.
It’s all right, Mom whispered to her. You can let go.
She did.
I heard them coming home in the night, not knowing if I was dreaming or awake.
#35
She loved ice skating. Come Winter, for a span of a few years, we would take lessons together. She shot far beyond me in skill, leaving me in the dust with all the little kids as I desperately tried to do some sort of toe loop without doing a split.
She had a purple velvet dress with silver sparkles on it that she would have used for competitions, had she ever had the chance to get into one.
#34
That little brat was taller than me.
#32
Her obituary is the first thing that comes up when I google her name.
#33
She refused to eat pizza as a child for the longest time, because it was something that I didn’t like.
#31
Her Sweet 16 birthday party was Hawaiian-themed. I cooked all the food in between school and work, trying my best to make it authentic, though she was such a picky eater.
#30
She wrote a lot, but never showed me her work.
We found her poetry after she had died and put it together into a book that comes with us to memorial services.
Definition - Life
We are small All so small In the start Just a cell Nothing more From two lovers We grow And learn to love We only know this We love and trust At least, in the begining It is the first thing that we can feel But as time passes we learn more Lke hatred Fear, jealousy, joy We begin our first day Fear, Cold, Bright A new world We are shoved into But it will be OK When SHE is there We learn about life How to live So much To learn and know and grow All so complicated But we succed Achieve So much Can go wrong At anytime Complications Mutations Diseases So much Uncertainty How can... Something so simple... Be so cursed? Complex Only a thread Of a chance For survival So much can go wrong Why bother?
- Lydia M
#29
If you look at a picture of our mom when she was eight and one of Lydia at the same age, the only way to tell the difference is through the yellowing of the photograph.
#28
She played flute in the high school band, just like our mom. She wanted to be in marching band, but never got that far.
As a gift to her when she started high school, Mom had her old flute refurbished. She bought another used flute and picked it up again herself as her daughter was learning.
Their practices were awful to listen to, but they had fun.
#27
In all our years of schooling, we were only ever in the same school once - when she was in kindergarten and I, in fourth grade. The span of years between our births separated us perfectly.
In some ways, it was easier being alone and unattached, an entity unto myself with no past and an unknown future.
But I would have liked to have been there to pull a freshman prank on her.
#26
We had the same high school art teacher. She was obsessed with making collages.
Lydia hated it as much as me. She just wanted to draw and take pictures.
#25
She was the family photographer. She liked taking odd selfies - through the bottom of a glass, in mirrors, of shadows. She liked nature and feet in brightly colored socks.
When she was old enough, the camera was handed to her on all family outings. I always hated how she constantly made everyone stop what they were doing to get a picture.
We hardly take pictures on trips anymore, or gatherings, or parties. I’ve barely seen myself in film for half a decade.
#24
Knowing full well what an awful movie it was in advance, we sat down one night and watched M. Night Shaymalan’s ‘Last Airbender.’ We needed to see the truth. We had to know what he had done.
We watched the entire thing in almost total silence, here and there breaking it to make a joke about the entire movie being in a slo-mo. It ended at the absolute worst place it could have possibly ended and the second the credits hit the screen we both burst out in hilarious and angry disbelief at what exactly we’d seen.
#22
We role-played on Gaia together, back before the inflation hit everything there.
It was a story of my invention. Her character was named Sal Las. I was pissed at first, because she’d chosen a palindrome for my serious story. But I got over it.
She was a plucky orphan who did odd jobs around a city built on the backs of criminal labor. Mine was a prisoner who lived in darkness ten years. She slipped him bread under his cell door and communicated in taps and scratches.
We were one another’s only friend.