He put his hands on my face, sweaty and frantic, but cold. They covered my whole face like a salt-rusted fishnet, my mouth too, there was no need, my voice had broken away at my ribcage. Close your eyes, close them, tight, look away, don’t look. I can still feel his life breaking onto my face, through his fingers, through his cracked pulse. The imprint of his hands that smelled of her, tattooed on my features, fractures added to something that I called mine, called whole. His hands moulded her death, the scent of it, her last moment, the memory of her, of all the reasons why and why not, into my skin, and I, without consent, incorporated her suicide in the way I look now.
I belong to that moment. He claimed that it was that moment that destroyed everything, him, her, she did it. I recognise our father’s logic everywhere, it was him who had built the world that we tried to recompose for our survival’s sake. I never wanted to exist in my father’s broken heart. Close your eyes, close them, tight, look away, don’t look. That was what he said to me after I had walked in on her death. It wasn’t the first time he had spoken those exact words. She told me that he would say that. And she repeated it to me, just in case he would ever come to me, she said.
All his hands on my eyes did was locking a shard into my body, an unspoken image, uneulogised, into my brain. Somehow, this shard, in its nature to cut, fit in and acknowledged silence and pain within me. My sister’s shard contained language and led me to the words that her body failed to communicate. My sister’s body had been shut down.
My father never wanted to be seen. With us. He existed as a form beside us, within us, out of sight. My father was committed to giving in. I know what my father sounds like. When my sister was told that she should look away, that meant that she would look at me if she kept her eyes open, unless he shut them for her, anything for her, put his hand over her eyelids, put pressure on her. I can’t stand the memory she had of what he made her body feel like with the sight of me pretending to sleep, feeling guilty, feeling excluded, complicit, disgusted, unloved, ashamed, unwanted, discarded without having been picked up. I had become an integral part of her pain, a part of what she wanted to kill and forget and eradicate from herself. My body that had been left alone, blanketed, soft and untouched, falling asleep to her stabbed breaths, to her contemplating her own death.
Close your eyes, close them, tight, look away, don’t look. As if the worst thing would be to see, to look, not to feel what cannot be seen. It’s shame. He knew that, he knew that he was taking away, he knew that he could not be trusted, that he was erasing the body that he had made, that he wasn’t alone, that someone lived in this body he drained. As if she could be distracted from what he needed. Distracted from what he took from her. I don’t know what my sister sounds like.
My sister’s suicide is the confession he never made. My sister’s life stands unacknowledged. Her death encapsulates the whole house in the loudness of her undissolved pain. When I saw her, what he had done to her externalised itself. More than an image, reality, memory. More. Everything. Too late. Too much. That’s the result of his pleasure. What he felt like to her. Don’t look – I wish I had looked when he told her not to.
Croque-Melpomene 