If You Had Done It

Dear Sister,

I have spent the last three-hundred-and-sixty-five days attempting to forget that you ever existed. I walk past the room down the hallway, which started its transformation into a second sitting room long before you no longer needed it, and pretend that it has always been so. I pretend the bright watermelon-coloured walls were never covered with your faceless paintings, your angry lyrics which you held so close to your heart. I block that Tuesday morning we spent, mother, grandmother, aunty and me, nostrils stinging from the vapid smell of turpentine and metho, scrubbing at the paint and permanent texta strewn across the walls. I can't remember why you weren't there now, nor can I remember if you even had an excuse for your absence. I scrubbed so hard, having to get up on the ladder to remove the word 'Cooper' from somewhere high above my own height, wondering how he had managed to write it up there in the first place. I knew he had written it, not you. Not because I recognised your handwriting, because the words were so skewed downward anyway with the strain of high-reaching that it could have been anyone's alien fingers writing on your wall. Nor was it the confessional way he wrote his own name, the letters of which seemed so small, uneven, insignificant, even though they were higher than all other writings on the walls. It was because I remembered the game the two of you used to play, the reason your white shirt with the sleeves cut off had 'Coope' scrawled across the back, and the bottom of his skateboard was permanently tattooed with 'Veri'. The game where you would compete to see how many things of one another's you could brand with your own name, without any thought to the implications this would have if the two of you ever broke up. And you did. And for those first few months Cooper, with his boyish face - because he was younger than you, my age - and sad eyes, and the fading American accent which sounded positively exotic when entwined with our own, filled my heart with so much hate because I could see the sadness he had brought to your eyes, and your last edge of youthfulness followed him away. I know you loved him, and I know he loved you. I knew the break-up was inevitable - he was always late, uncaring, and you did not nurture him like he so needed after the death of his mother - but I despised the both of you for it. You because you turned back into your angry, snappy self who cried with almost no provocation, and him because I believed all of this was his fault. And because of this I scrubbed his name so hard off your wall that not only the black permanent texta in which it had been scrawled came off, but so did the layer of off-white paint which coloured the wall, revealing the original colour, parchment yellow, underneath. For those weeks before we sealed and painted the walls, when they were covered in the grey smudges which had once been poetry to you, transformed into a storm of muddled, clouded thoughts, there was a hole where Cooper used to be. I used to go in and stare at it, around the whole room, and wonder how the practice of cleaning its walls, purifying it, purifying you, had turned into a metaphor for my beautiful sister who inside was simply and mass of black thoughts which we, you loved ones, had tried to smudge, cover, and wash away, and a gaping hole, higher, more important than the rest, the part of you that was torn away by your first love.

There are other things which are harder to ignore and pretend away, but are things which you get used to, and gradually I have forgotten how they used to be, and therefore I can no longer miss my 'old life'. Our family converses differently now. The ease at which we used to coexist is now tainted, as is every word with speak, with sympathy and concern. A simple 'How are you?' is now coupled with a tilt of the head and a slightly furrowed brow, lips closed together in a pleasant formation of trepidation. As the anniversary drew closer, our bones became rigid and we stopped asking each other this question, not wanting to know. We have slowly learnt to lie with almost every part of our bodies. We have attempted to relearn the body language and words we used back in the days when we were happy. And we have mastered this technique with every mechanism but our eyes, which mirror one another, showing the strain we all feel, torn between staying strong for each other and simply breaking. Although it was unspoken between us at the time, it was understood that we could not break, that we could not let this tear us apart from each other and ourselves. But we are drifting away from one another on a wave of silence, so another of our plights, our ideas, our beliefs, has failed, but we cannot bring ourselves to admit it, not yet.

I wish I could turn you into a distant memory. I wish my only-child fantasies, my entire history which I have spent hours rewriting for myself, altering the memories to emit you, were strong enough to fool me into believing them. Perhaps you think I am sitting here praying that I could somehow go back in time and make it so that you had never been born, and perhaps sometimes this is true. I don't want to feel this pain you have bestowed upon me every day of my life, and I don't want to have to hide the fact that the only thing I want to do is sit down and sob for you.

I have not cried since it happened. I cried once, on the night, out of shock before it had finally sunk in, but never since. My eyes would sometimes long for it. My head would pound and it would seem as if my entire body was trying to force me to grieve. You may find this strange, knowing how often I used to cry beforehand. A tragic happening within in novel, a sad ending to a movie, or a happy one, or an inspirational one; all of these things would spring tears into my eyes. You never cried. You were my rock in these situations, my source of comfort. But that's not true either, is it? I would cry and you would laugh good-naturedly about how pathetic it all was. You would look at me incredulously and remind me once more that the people in the movie were not real, that the drama was only storyboards sprung to life. And how strange it seems now, that once there was a real tragedy in my life, I could do nothing. My tears remain inside me, black marks which I have attempted to smudge with my fake smiles, my incessant cheerfulness. I see it in all of us who knew you. Our eyes mirror one another, lifeless, like ice, frozen in the moment we heard the news.

The legacy you left is clear to me now, as I write, and it is this: In this past year, instead of forgetting, I have become you.