To those who have lost,
and those who will lose.
Row
When your older sister disappears
under the cover of night,
during a snowstorm,
leaving no tracks
and no trace,
someone should notice.
I noticed.
When she wasn’t jockeying
for the shower.
When she wasn’t sprawled
across the sectional
mindlessly scrolling through socials.
When she wasn’t being
a total bitch.
But Ariana isn’t here.
Her open bedroom door
exposes a tidy,
silent room
with a slightly rumpled duvet cover,
emanating the smell
of verbena-coconut body wash
into the hall.
I don’t know where she went.
I don’t know how long she’s gone for,
but I’m afraid that
she might never return.
Because for the past few months
I feel like Ariana has become
that one station on the car radio
that gains more static
the farther away you drive,
like she is the one
driving farther away
from something.
But I don’t know
what that something is,
and I don’t know
where she is heading.
Maybe it’s us.
Maybe she’s driving
farther away from our history,
trying to find
her own future.
Without us.
Without me.
Ariana
I’ll tell you what grief looks like.
It’s a forty-year-old woman, unshowered,
for two days, in yoga pants and a Barnard sweatshirt
and eyeliner that hasn’t been scrubbed off her face.
It’s dried, chapped hands that crack around the knuckles,
raw from washing away too many emotions.
It’s bloated faces. It’s open wine bottles.
Stained glasses that remain in the sink.
It’s the nursery half-painted, half-stenciled with giraffes.
A mural unfinished. A crib disassembled on the carpet.
It’s your stepmother telling your father that she’s “fine.”
It’s my father searching for something to eat
in an empty fridge, searching for something to say.
It’s me sitting at the kitchen counter
and sliding him a carton of takeout.
It’s the house that was supposed to be filled
with a wailing baby, poopy diapers,
and a kid who would eventually toddle.
And it’s me knowing that I should be grieving
with my family, with my father, my stepmom, and Row.
But I can’t.
Because I’m trudging through the snow,
hauling an eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch
painting wrapped in brown paper
awkwardly stuck under my arm,
escaping.
Row
Dad doesn’t notice
that I slam Ariana’s
bedroom door shut.
He emerges from the master bedroom
and reaches for a pot of coffee
that has turned cold
because it was
from yesterday.
I watch him microwave
the dredges
and wonder if
day-old coffee
tastes stale.
Does he notice
that Ariana isn’t
standing in the kitchen
with thick droplets of water
falling to the kitchen floor
from the ends
of her waterlogged hair?
Dad returns to his bedroom
and closes the door
on the world
again.
I eat a bowl of cereal
that tastes like
living rooms,
and minivans
and family
and I look out the window
“Hey, guys, it snowed.”
Ariana
I didn’t just wake up at four a.m. and decide
to suddenly change my life. No one does that.
No one decides to change their life. Their life instead
changes for them. Without warning.
Without a chance to decide.
Because in the natural order of things, death is normal,
but we do a shit job at expecting it.
I’m out here due to an accumulation
of little things. For sure.
A blizzard. A blog post. A failing grade.
A general unease about living.
Like my skin doesn’t know how to be
warm or cold or normal.
A sister.
I saw the chaos of snow flying in all directions. I heard
the rush of wind. At four in the morning, from the safety
of my bedroom window, I could see a world
that couldn’t be controlled.
Finally. A picture of the world as I see it.
Outside. In the middle of a blizzard.
The thing about death is that you can never fight it.
Be it bacterial or viral,
addiction or cancer, natural causes or accidents,
something is destined to kill us.
Because in the natural order of things, dying happens.
I read a blog post on my phone, alone
in my room last night, by a girl around my age.
Her father died last summer. Cancer.
Stage four. A five-month prognosis.
I was jealous. Of all the extra time the girl
had with her father. I should know that there is
no point in playing grief Olympics. To pit one
source of pain against another.
But I find myself questioning
who had it worse?
What if I had a five-month warning?
How much more Mom could I have had?
Six years, thirty-seven days.
The girl admitted to the world that she thought
those last five months would be different.
She thought there would be hours of quality time.
That she and her dying father would talk about things
they never talked about. She expected to discover
new things about her father, her family, life itself.
But none of that happened.
Instead, he continued to do all the things you absolutely
do not have to do when you know you’re going to die.
Go to work. Run errands. Fret about taxes.
But he did, because maybe, like me, he was scared.
To create meaning. To connect with those around you.
Because it only reminds you
of your own impending death,
and I don’t want to die. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
Row
When our mother died,
Ariana and I
didn’t go to school
for a month,
even though
we were supposed to,
even though
we were just barely old enough
to spend time
alone in our house.
During that month
we learned to cook
ramen. We learned to wash
rice and crack eggs.
We never made our bed
s
because no one
told us to.
We spent long afternoons
lying on top
of piles of laundry.
We practiced French braids
and ponytails
and detangling
each other’s hair,
and keeping secrets
and sharing secrets
and fearing the worst
and holding hands.
We stayed inside
our rambler in California,
sliding across the tile floor
in our socks,
wandering from room to room,
and sitting on the floor
of Mom’s closet full of clothes
just because we could.
“Don’t leave me,”
I said to Ariana
while underneath
all those clothes,
but I meant something deeper
than me. I meant
don’t let it change
this feeling of us.
This frozen moment
in time when it was
just Ariana and me
and this house
and these shapeless reminders
Ariana held me so tight,
for so long,
that I thought
maybe we could,
we would hold on to this forever.
I know there’s no longer California,
or a month without school,
or a closet full of Mom’s clothes,
but I thought, Ariana,
that we still had us,
to hold on to, forever.
Ariana
Pellets of snow and ice smack me in the face
and the wind blows from every angle.
The butcher paper tears at the corners,
and the canvas underneath begins to poke through.
The package slides out from under my armpit.
I stop and readjust. Shift the painting to my other arm.
Maybe I should have put the whole thing
in a giant trash bag
and hauled it over my shoulder.
It’s not like it’s heavy.
It’s not like it should be hard to carry a painting
in the wind,
protecting it from the snow, trying not to drop it
while walking
to the bus station in a snowstorm.
What would people say about what I am doing?
Would they call it selfish? Desperate? Ill-advised.
A car fishtails at the stoplight ahead. The back wheels
begin to skid, but the driver regains control
and straightens onto the dark street ahead.
It’s way too snowy and way too early for either of us
to be out here on the streets heading somewhere.
But we are.
Because, like snowstorms and earthquakes and death,
your future will happen regardless of whether
you planned for it.
Row
I walked through the door
after practice
on Thursday.
My family stood
in the living room
staring down
at what looked like
a porcelain crime scene.
“That was your mother’s favorite.”
Dad’s hands trembled
as he got down
and picked broken pieces
off the floor.
I tossed aside shin guards
and stripped off socks.
“What’s going on?”
But no one answered.
“Row, I have something
to tell you,”
Maribel started.
She winced
and doubled over.
I froze.
Dad sprang to his feet.
He cooed into Maribel’s ear
and rubbed her back
with such vigor
that the cotton tunic
she wore began to bunch.
I felt the sting
of sliding on artificial turf
run all over my skin.
Ariana just stared
at the pile on the floor.
“Why can’t we have
something good for once?”
“Ariana,” Dad said.
“Please don’t make it worse.”
My sister was
a tangled knot of hair,
the kind you need
scissors to cut out.
“God. The cramps,”
Maribel said,
gritting her teeth,
clutching her side.
The room was large and exposed.
All the lights were on.
I heard them buzzing.
Ariana didn’t even flinch.
I should have
said something to Maribel.
I should have
said something to Ariana.
Put her in check.
But it’s like I couldn’t.
Because Ariana was
sucking all of the courage
and strength
out of the room.
She consumed everything
that might have helped
just by standing there
doing nothing.
The words I might have said.
To Maribel. To let her know
that we were here for her.
We saw her pain.
But I didn’t do anything
because all I could focus on
was my older sister and her
selfish, self-involved pain.
Dad led Maribel
back into the bedroom.
I heard the door close
with a distant click.
“What happened?” I said.
“Nothing,” said Ariana.
She gritted her teeth
and clenched her jaw,
just like Maribel,
trying to fight away pain.
“What happened?” I repeated,
still holding my soccer bag.
Feeling the weight
of the gear on my shoulder.
“I threw one of Mom’s figurines.”
“What happened?”
I said again, firmly this time.
Ariana still didn’t respond,
but I didn’t need her to tell me
anything about what was going on.
I felt it, like the dread
of picking up
an unexpected phone call,
knowing what the person
on the other end
was going to say
but wanting them
to say it anyway.
To make it real.
“It’s the baby, isn’t it?” I said.
Ariana held the broken shards
of a porcelain in her palm.
She closed her hand around it,
and I wondered
if she did this
just to feel
the sharp edges
of pain piercing,
but not breaking, the skin.
We stood there
in front of the couch
where just yesterday
we marathoned a show
about small-town secrets
and portals to another world.
Now it’s like I’ve entered the portal
and found a different sister.
If she were a player on my team,
I’d find the words
to give her a pep talk,
reinforce the strengths
she possesses,
point out a weakness
on the other side’s defense,
and show her a way
to break through.
But recently, I’m not sure
she’s even on my same team.
Or if instead she’s simply
walk
ed off the field,
because that’s what it feels like
not a teammate
or an opponent,
but a sister
who refuses
to play.
Row
“It’s not a competition,” I said.
“You don’t get to be the only one
who feels it. You don’t get to consume
all the sadness in the world.”
“Feels what?”
Ariana finally looked up.
“The steaming pile of shit
that is grief.”
“What do you want me
to say, Row?”
Ariana looked the same
as always in a lot of ways.
Like her round cheeks
were still holding on
to being a child,
the way that my body
did the same,
but there was something else
that I hadn’t really noticed.
If you looked at her
long enough,
her rounded face
would begin to fall,
the muscles strained
to a point where they decided
to give up.
I always thought that as sisters
we would be unchanging.
I thought that was the whole point.
That sisters were like baby blankets.
With you since the crib,