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
and say to no one,
“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,