an open letter to my darling sister, P

you were the first glimmer of hope that maybe i would no longer be alone

Dear P,

Our journey started when I was not yet 6 years old, sitting at a booth table opposite your parents, our dad and D, where they explained to me the imminent arrival of you.

They called you Bun, like a bun in the oven, but to me, a sweet little bunny waiting to join us. I was smitten, all in on my imminent sisterhood. That day they let me choose your name from two options, and let me tell you now, you’re welcome.

I was driving with my mom when Dad called to tell me of your entrance into the world; that little bun was now little P, and she was here to stay. So that very afternoon, we went and bought you a stuffed bunny, BunBun, as she’s still known to this day (though now she’s worn and weathered).

You were a dream. Soft and pink. Squirming and fragile. You’d only stop crying when I held you, and though I was so young myself, you were mine. You were the first glimmer of hope I’d tasted that maybe, hopefully, I would no longer be alone.

me & baby P

I knew what you’d been born into. What I’d already been living. I vowed to protect you; your innocence was a vital force, and I was its humble guard.

As you grew, you gave me purpose in the house that still haunts my nightmares. I brought you toys and built elaborate forts to house our imaginative spirits — to protect them in an impenetrable bubble where D and her unending wrath could not find us. I brushed your hair and read you to sleep. I’d check on you in the night across our Jack & Jill bathroom; I’d go in and comfort you when you cried (despite D’s insistence that children should cry it out). We’d spend your timeouts together in your room because, as far as I could tell, you’d never actually done anything wrong.

We ran play stores and houses and restaurants; you watched me defeat LEGO Star Wars on the Wii we begged Dad to buy us, much to D’s dismay. I picked you up when you fell and skinned your knees. I taught you how to catch fireflies and sled down the enormous hill behind our house, noting exactly when it was time to bail from the sled before crashing into the brambles below.

I had your back, even when things got hard, and awareness and fear started to eclipse your childlike wonder and happy-go-lucky spirit.

my sweet P

When I got sick, they stopped letting me talk to you, but I knew you were aware. I knew you saw what was happening to me, that you missed me, and that you still needed me. But D kept us apart, even when seated at the same dinner table night after night. At one point, I warned them that the darkness would find you, too, if they didn’t change their ways. But you were still giggling and silly and hiding your fear, and they wanted to believe that what happened to me was my fault, not theirs.

I bought you Rupi Kaur’s first book of poems and told you that you could always talk to me, no matter what anyone said. That you were never alone. But I wasn’t there enough. Shuffled from hospital to hospital during that crucial turning point into your own adolescence. I’m sorry. I thought about you all of the time. I didn’t realize when it was too late. When you were hurting yourself, and D made it about her, and I was in college, and Dad was lying to me about you. Then I moved to California, and though I came to visit you often and spent as many days as I could by your side during that time, it wasn’t enough.

Our grandma told us both how Dad didn’t want you and how the day D told him she was pregnant, he ran to get a vasectomy. Probably something you never needed to know. And she called me when I moved to California to tell me how a fight between you and D ended with D locking herself in a closet with a knife and a death wish, blaming it all on your so-called insolence.

I came home for the holidays and found you drinking from bottles I had left behind from my college days. I saw your scars, and I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, so I warned D and Dad — compassion, get her help, love her properly, please. Please.

But instead they locked you up and threw away the key. Dad called me the following Thanksgiving and told me they were thinking of committing you; he was panicked. You’d run from the house after a fight with D. I started looking at flights immediately. But then you called me later and told me the real story… how D had lost it once and for all and told you to self-harm somewhere less obvious, like she did, because your scars were unsightly. How she searched your room for needles and then screamed in your face to go fuck yourself. And how even then, Dad was too cowardly to stop it, how he told me a false story just to protect her, as he had always done, even with me. I cried for days. For you, for me, for this life we never asked for.

R and I sent you a cellphone hidden in a book we carved pages out of and mailed it to my former home (because back then, D was screening all of your mail, and I was no longer talking to her or Dad—and wouldn’t for several years, D never again).

You needed access to the outside world when they tried to snuff you out and control the narrative, and this was the best we could do for you. We talked every single day on that phone. You told me about sneaking a boy in and losing your virginity. How he didn’t treat you right, but you felt you deserved it anyway. I listened, always, in fear but without judgment. I did a lot of the same things in my dark days. We understood each other better than anyone else ever could. We usually still do.

Dad and D left for a spring break trip without you, so I came to see you finally. And we found the letters together. The prophetic and nauseating proof of their affair, the demented prose of delusion that rankled my existence but ultimately led to yours. I didn’t let you read them. Even then, I had hope that there was hope for you with them. It wasn’t my place. Where D was never my mother, she was always yours. We always understood that your hurt and mine weren’t the same, and we respected what our traumas wrought, however different.

After that, I started flying you to California for Thanksgivings, and most of the time you would just sleep and sleep and sleep. The depression that couldn’t ever rest at home could finally exhale, if only for a few short days. I worried every day. I was ready at a moment’s notice to come get you and bring you home with me for good. When you dropped out of college, I was terrified at the thought of you back under D’s roof in the state you were in. But you have always been stronger than anyone has given you credit for.

You found a job that saved you, and friends to support you. Eventually, I moved back East, and together R & I moved you out of that house for good. Filling your first apartment with Hello-Kitty and crystals and all of the beautiful signs that this was a place just for you. A safe place, at last.

It’s been a long road, and you’re only 22. But my darling, through all of the tribulations of this life, you have always sparkled. There have been horrible days, bad boys, problematic friendships, a dependency or two, a chronic illness, and more trauma than anyone should have to consider normal. But there has always been you. I have an unending admiration for your youness, your utter P-ness (as we call it). The care that you have every right to not offer to the world and the broken people within it. How you still care for Dad despite all that he’s done. How you hold wayward strangers like they are your kin, with compassion and love because you too know what it is to be hurt by the unfairness of life and the cruel hand of others. How you took in a stray cat, Samantha, from your apartment and sent me endless photos of her for a year. How you love still with your whole heart because you’ve never been able to do it any other way.

Even when the empathy twists your heart such that we’re crying together on the phone late at night, you’ll never turn your back on it. How in all of the unkind things that have ever been said to you, you never have an unkind thing to say back. How your room is a chaos of vines and knicknacks and soft blankets and ideally an animal of some kind, and it’s unmistakably yours — even when dishes pile on every surface, and you can’t see the floor because depression has a vice grip and no one ever showed you how to care for yourself. It’s as tender as you have always been. All that you have endured has never hardened you. I look up often in admiration at your enduring light and never fail to learn something crucial about my own survival.

Many years ago, you came into this world and saved my life. You’ve saved it again and again since. My beacon of hope when all is bleak. My one consistent reminder that in this life I am never alone. It’s all I can do every day, from now until forever, to repay this miracle to you.

Thank you for being my sister, my unconditional partner, a reminder that there is always something to live for, that my personality is not a flaw, that my hurt is not in vain, that my joy is not to be compromised, and that my mistakes do not make me unlovable.

I see you coming into your own. I see your insistence on taking this life at your pace. I see you grappling with all that has been and all that you cannot predict. I see your gentleness, your tenacity, and your fierce love. I benefit from it all. You teach me new lessons every day. Whether we go weeks without talking or text daily, it’s always you, and it’s always me.

My soulmate, though we couldn’t be more different. My guardian angel. My sister. My P.

I love you without condition and without restraint. Always have and always will.

your sister,

-June

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