Ariana
I glance down at the phone in my hand.
There’s a text from Row lighting up the screen.
What if she wants me to be sisterly and strong?
When Row scored the winning goal in the state finals,
Dad’s face literally glowed, like he was so happy and so proud
he didn’t know whether to cry or to scream.
Instead he reached out to me, to Maribel,
and pulled us in close. I wanted to feel happy
along with them, but the muscles that held my smile ached.
What would they say if they knew I was failing
because I couldn’t get my act together?
I lost track of time. I was supposed to
graduate and go on and be normal. Like Row.
I didn’t feel like anyone’s older sister. Not right now.
Maybe I could go to the art show. Get my passing grade.
Return home and then I would pull out the catalogs
of college choices. I would ask Row and Maribel for help.
We would sit down together
and pore over pictures
and no one would remember the day it snowed,
when I failed to leave a note, respond to a text.
When I disappeared for hours
because I was scared of them finding out
that I wasn’t well adjusted.
I wasn’t normal.
I wasn’t strong and sisterly.
I’m just me.
The light is starting to break through the trees.
The snow has stopped,
but the thick white clouds hover off in the distance.
The countryside disappears
at sixty miles an hour, and I lean my head
against a window with finger smudges
and nose prints, slipping the phone back into my pocket,
turning the ringer to silent.
Row
The baby must have passed away
just hours after Maribel returned home
from her doctor’s appointment
where our sister was said to be
a healthy weight and size.
Our sister’s heart stopped beating,
like our mother’s, unexpectedly,
on a day that was otherwise
normal.
I wonder what it was like for Maribel
to hold on to something
that had died.
I wish that I could see Maribel
to know that she will be okay,
even after the cramping passes,
the bleeding stops,
after our sister is exhumed
from her body.
I look over at the closed master bedroom
and hear nothing.
No television. No voices.
No crying. No shower.
I look down the hall at Ariana’s door.
The silence without her is deafening.
I go to my room, close the door,
and turn on a podcast about soccer
just to fill the room with noise.
But I wish it wasn’t just talking.
I wish there was someone around
who could listen.
Row
I remember our first snowfall together. Here
in my room Ariana and I watched
the way that snow tries to
seclude us as neighbors’
houses disappeared
among snow
drifts.
“I miss
her,” Ariana
said after twenty
minutes of soundless
gazing. I remember her
voice, the way it trembled
with uncertainty. I remember
the thick salty tears that welled
in my eyes and when Ariana brushed
her hand against my shoulder, I couldn’t
hold them back. Neither could she. Neither
could the sky that dumped clumps of snow. I
remember looking out at the landscape and back at
Ariana, seeing the extent to which people can change
so quickly. The way flakes could pile up one speck at a
time and transform the world before us into shapeless mounds.
I remember the feeling of us, together, letting ourselves cry over snow.
Ariana
We’re supposed to have a backstory.
We’re supposed to have a series of life experiences
that have brought us to this moment in time.
I’m sitting on a bus that’s headed away
from the place where I live, because I’m failing
art class, jeopardizing whatever future I’m supposed
to be having, and not even questioning how the hell I got here.
I’m just here. The product of a failed backstory.
In German there is a word for experience, Erlebnis,
which comes from the verb erleben,
and translates as living through something.
In English, we have no succinct word
for living through something.
Maybe it could have been different had I not been there
watching my mom fall to the floor at a Starbucks,
dropping her phone and clawing at her chest.
The newspaper she held fluttered to the floor,
the way a heart might sometimes flutter.
Not because you’re nervous or falling in love.
But like when you’re sitting at your desk
in the middle of a trigonometry test
and your heart unexpectedly flutters.
I remember the wail of the steamer frothing milk.
The barista on her cell phone. The paramedics
scurrying around my mother. I remember I stood there
in silence, frozen against an immovable display case full of crap.
Like maybe if I stayed real still, time itself would slow down.
But time didn’t stop. The world didn’t slow down
with me. It kept on plowing ahead.
In the aftermath of death, those of us who survive
have little preparation for what we’re actually supposed to do
with our lives from that point forward.
Like the entire concept of having a backstory is erased.
There is only before your mother died, and now.
Each day is now.
It feels neither farther nor closer to the moment she died.
It feels like another day, of actions and reactions,
but without anything to live through, without Erlebnis.
Row
I text all seventeen girls
from the varsity squad
to see if anyone is down
for a pickup game of soccer,
because when I’m on a field
people listen to me.
They pay attention.
My teammates. They see me.
My opponents. They see me.
The people in the stands.
Coaches. Scouts.
I am a player to be seen.
I know it’s not the right kind of listening
or the right kind of being seen.
But being noticed, even if it’s not
for the thing that you want to be noticed for,
still feels all right, like you matter
and there is someone out there who cares.