I don’t know how to talk about my sister or where to start.

Tucked into a photo album at my parents’ house, there is a picture of us from 1999 (she would have been 7, and I was not quite 2). In the picture we are both eating apples, hers is normal and intact (skin on), while the apple in my hands is peeled. If my sister was taking bites out of her apple, lame apple slices would simply not suffice for me. I wanted nothing to do with that baby shit.

I was seven or eight when my sister informed me that we could not be soulmates.

Anyone would have forgiven my sister if she stopped playing with me, once she got to be a teenager – the almost six year age difference was tricky, and it seemed to surprise everyone just how close we were in spite of it – but she didn’t. And when she did stop wanting to play, my sister still made time for me, including me sometimes when she did things with her friends, who were also very sweet about it. My occasional inclusion in my sister’s social life was able to continue, for better and for worse, when she went to college in Pittsburgh. Her friends were cool and, at the very least, tolerated me.

The summer after seventh grade (the summer after my sister’s freshman year), my parents stopped making me go to bed when they did, and I discovered a lot of things, the most important being Freaks and Geeks, which my sister and I would watch together the nights she did not spend with her boyfriend. That year for Christmas, she gave me the series box set on DVD.

The summer before I started high school, she let me smoke weed with her for the first time. Although it took some convincing to get my parents to allow me to spend the night with her at her apartment, they ultimately allowed themselves to be convinced. Walking down the alley while she smoked, I asked if she would let me take a hit from her spliff, and she did. I do not remember if I got high that time, but it’s doubtful.

The summer before I started high school, my sister and her boyfriend at the time took me to the late night Pink Floyd laser light show at the Carnegie Science Center. We sat on the steps down by the river and shared a joint between the three of us. I did get high that time, and seeing those lasers perfectly coordinated to Dark Side of the Moon was exactly the kind of life-changing, revelatory experience you would imagine it to be for a 14 year old Pink Floyd fan.

On a rainy fall afternoon, at the beginning of twelfth grade and after my sister graduated and was back living at home, she shared with me her favorite film, Requiem for a Dream. The queasy dread I felt in the pit of my stomach was there before the movie started, had been for at least a year before that, but watching the movie with her that afternoon made it permanent. Poured concrete over an inkling of doubt and dread and fear and cemented it right there in my stomach so heavy it immobilized me.

A couple weeks later we all watched Darjeeling Limited together, my sister, my mom, my dad, and I all sitting together in the living room in front of the television. And then a couple weeks after that it was winter break, and my sister stood swaying in my bedroom at 1:00 AM and told me she was a heroin addict. It was the first of a few late night, tranquilizer-fueled confessions she slurred her way through, around in circles, repeating the same few things over and over. She was a heroin addict, but she wanted to stop, she was going to stop. She said she was a bad sister; she apologized a lot. She was a heroin addict, but not the needle, never the needle, she assured me even though it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. She was telling me and giving me permission to do whatever I wanted to with this information. She knew things were getting out of control when she hid her face behind a pillow so she could snort bumps of heroin while we watched Darjeeling Limited. She was so, so sorry and she understood if I felt like I needed to tell Mom and Dad. I had just turned eighteen. I was paralyzed. I didn’t realize that I was supposed to tell my parents. Things were already tense at home (in no small part due to my parents’ existing suspicions that my sister was using drugs) and I couldn’t fathom making it worse.

The following September, during my freshman year of college, my sister told her best friend who immediately drove from Philadelphia to sit with my sister while she told my parents and helped my mom call rehab facilities to find an open bed for my sister while my dad drove to Penn State to sit with me in the arboretum while my sister told me over the phone that she was going to rehab. Finally, I was not the sole holder of this heavy secret. Finally, I could breathe without the weight of my dread/fear/guilt keeping my mouth shut and paralyzing me.

Now, I am 24 and my sister turned 30 in July. She lives across the country and has not been in contact with me recently.

The last long conversation we had, just the two of us, was more than a year ago, just before she started going through a very bad time. (I am not a good enough writer to convey how awful her circumstances were without being explicit. Last year, during a brief phone call with me and my parents on her birthday, my sister said it felt like she was living in a David Cronenberg movie. Horror of horrors.) She has since started using heroin again, but this time she is on the needle.

Maybe I do know how to talk about my sister, but it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like enough. I don’t want to talk about my sister, I want to talk to her. Two weeks ago, my mom bought a phone for her, so she has a phone now at least. I send her little texts about my day, what I’m doing, that I love her. I call, too, but her voicemail is full. She doesn’t pick up the phone and she doesn’t reply to my texts.

I am never not thinking about my sister. I would do anything for her, and nothing has been scarier than being so far away and feeling so helpless while she is struggling. The worst part, which I have only come to suspect recently, is that my sister believes being in contact with me, that our relationship is contingent on her sobriety. Or that she thinks she does not deserve to have a relationship with me, with our family, while she is using. These are different, yes? How can I make sure she understands this?

I am always thinking about my sister. I am also trying very hard to continue living my own life, though I don’t know if I’m doing the best job of it. It’s really hard.

In twelfth grade I took a Creative Nonfiction Writing English elective class and for one of the assignments, I wrote an essay about going to the movies, which I was miraculously able to dig up from my email archives. I was eighteen, freshly, finally diagnosed with ADHD, and weighed down by this big secret on top of the pre-existing household tensions. An excerpt:

"I love movies, but watching a movie anywhere else would be cheaper and more practical. However, the movie theater is the one place where I can consistently turn my brain off and pay attention. I get overwhelmed easily; busy places with too many people and too much noise constantly pull at my attention. At the theater, the movie is the only thing; it creates an environment where it isn’t just easier to focus on one thing, it’s fun. The lights are down, my phone is off, and no one talks. The movie plays loudly. There isn’t anything else. Everywhere else I have to put effort into focusing. In the movie theater, I have to put effort into being distracted."

I did a lot of things in high school to avoid being at home. I was in the fall play my last two years, I managed the cross country team, ran track, even joined Forensics (speech and debate); but I never considered going to the movies part of that list until I dug up the essay. I’m reconsidering. That being said, I have never thought of going to the movies as an “escape”, and even if I did, my summer at the movies wouldn’t allow it.

I’m always thinking about my sister. Especially this summer, especially at the movies, especially at the movies this summer.

The first movie was AmbuLAnce, which I guess I saw in April, so this Spring, but whatever. Danny Sharp convinces his brother Will to help with a robbery that goes very horribly wrong.

Next was The Black Phone, which I saw at the very multiplex I wrote about in high school. When Finney Shaw is kidnapped by a serial killer in 1970s Denver, his younger sister Gwen starts having dreams about the kidnapping – and the kidnappings which preceded her brother’s – her visions being the clues that lead to the police finding where the killer has hid the bodies.

Finally there was Nope, where siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood take on an otherworldly force together, risking their lives to stay on the family ranch so they might document the thing that is terrorizing them.

Watching these three movies in the theater this summer, these movies about siblings going to such drastic lengths to help or protect or fight for each other knocked the wind out of me, to say the least. I thought I would have more to say about them, once I got here, but I don’t even know that I do. It’s just this: I am never not thinking about my sister. But there is nothing I can do right now that I am not already doing. That is, reaching out to her and continuing to do so. I thought I processed the guilt I felt over my failure to act on her confession when I was 18, but the circumstances changed.

I am older now than my sister was that December when she first told me, my relationship with my parents is healthier now, and we are able to support each other through this time.

Meanwhile, my sister is across the country. We are stuck with this awful waiting, feeling the full impotence of it. I’m not a kid anymore, I’m not paralyzed by my fear and doubt. I am ready to take action, to do whatever it is that my sister needs, and I fucking want to. Instead I am supposed to accept that there is nothing that I can do unless my sister reaches out. A hard pill to swallow that’s stuck in my throat.

8 August 2022