My Sister's Keeper

Maudlin with whisky, watching this family tragedy on tele; sitting slumped, thinking;

“But they love each other.”

The sobs; the looming death, the tensions and all the cacophony of loss, each lost pause and angry shout. Each scene, every scene is glossy with love; is glossy with a precocious normality.

My breath catches, escapes me, betrays me.

“Are you sleeping?” my love says from her end of the couch.

And I wonder whether to pretend I am sobbing at the movie.

We go back to the screen, back to my glass of whisky, back to the mind numb, back to the glaze.

And my eyes are blurry; awash with tears and the bit in the back of my mind that tells me not to make a fool of myself, not to make some grand, emotional, drunken statement.

Later, in the dark, after I have come back downstairs to stop waking my love with my whisky breath snoring. Later in the dark; muzzy, glad of the sheet, of the cushion. I find myself wishing I could say it, could write it so that at least I could understand, that I could tell someone and they would feel it, understand it, know it.

I think of words that cut, that seal, that put a lid on, rip a scab off, I think of death and blankness, of darkness and a terrified fall in the echoing canyon of my deepest fears. I think I want to be like the great poets and writers so that, a million years on, someone will read my words and feel that whirl in their hearts and jolt in their minds that says “I know what you are saying.”

I cannot, I cannot say the words. I cannot make sense of it. I do not know what to feel or what to do. I cannot even feel beyond the clench in my throat and the hollow in my stomach.

My son, why do you say that I am dead to you? Why do you hate me so much that not even my remotest friends know where you live or what you do for fear they will tell me?

Why?

What did I do?

What am I?

I do not understand.

I have no words; I cannot grasp this life.