false equivalency
When I turned twenty-three, my life remained largely the same. I was unshakeable, and also embarrassingly thin. A breeze could have knocked the strings of my life over in one calculated gust. I was strong, though. Unmovable. Stable. All ironic words to describe a girl with bipolar disorder. My life was made entirely up of leaps and bounds and puddles of nothing and snow-topped mountain peaks too high to see the bottom.
My little sister was taken from us that year. She had violated probation, got arrested, and stabbed an officer. He was okay, but nobody else was. My family, splintered and weathered, buckled under the weight and worry and torment. I felt guilty for soaring. My wings could unfurl with her gone, I was not so scared to live in my own house, I did not miss my sister, I was strong and unshakable.
The second night she was away, I cried for hours. My faults laid bare, my guilt made apparent, my shame and fear split open from the inside. They were itching to be released, or maybe they escaped. I always saw my sister as a kind of warped mirror; Everything I wasn't, she was. I lived in guarded safety; she was courageous. I was quiet and forgiving; she was a steamroller, a firecracker, a hurricane of force. I observed; she lived.
I still don't know if she was ever those things. I wonder how many of these were placed on her by me, trying to make her look perfect and wonderful. Perhaps I wanted to explain it all away, the drugs, violence, anger, blind-hot rage, as some kind of proof of life.
My sister is still alive. I just don't know her. The version of her alive in my head, not my sister but my little sister who grew up taming rollercoasters and scaling towers too tall for me to climb, is hidden away. I live, now. She is a haze in my mind, a cloud, a fog.
The wind that could blow me away could take her, too. She is a mirror version of me made real through my own cowardice. It sticks my feet against the ground, tries to swallow me whole.
I am left with myself. I make myself stand taller, grow roots around my frozen feet, and fill the hole gaping within me. I hope this will fix things. It does not.