Start with medications. In the syringe. A liquid droplet. your friends wide-eyed giving pity, cross legged in the grass. You look far, a disengaged look from what the words actually mean, telling the story of the sister. How medications annihilated a family’s peace.
It’s April, and it’s Wisconsin so everything is chilled. Talk about the paling skin from the crisp bits of random wind. The grass warms from your body. The trees are blooming late, only some are beginning to bud.
Medications. Given like a miracle. Like immortality. Like the drawers filled with bottles. New prescriptions to cash. Will she get better, you ask. Once we start more therapy's, your mother answers. You say good bye to your sister, as she and your mother leave for the cure. We go to Poland for a month, and travel to Michigan twice a year. They are going to Mexico this time, injecting stem cells to fix the damaged brain. As you wonder, is there really an elixir to change everything.
It failed, we are sorry, the doctor states as he walks away. Which means she will have to go through surgery again. She has to have her hip bone pulled down, to place an artificial shoulder where her femur head should be. She will stop being in so much pain, there will be no more need for morphine. Your mom will spend every day writing a book on your sisters life, so you will remember. Your cousin sits watching SpongeBob, soon he has to get her noon medications. When your sister dies, he will start drinking. Would you like fries with that, your cousin joked, as you told him you failed another test. You talked every day, watching SpongeBob. Her high snorts tangled with his deep chortle. Purple couches. Open windows. Lighting white walls. When she died he left and never came back. Then you see him drunk, he weeps, his slurred words, he was sorry. He cannot come back to the house, it reminds him to much of her. He deserted you, and left you alone. Where he himself cannot bare to go.
Don’t forget the medications… the Baclofen, the Phenobarbital, the Keppra, the Diazepam, the Clorazepate, the Banzel, the Zonisamide, the MiraLAX, or the Ibuprofen, and don’t ever forget the Morphine. How your mother and cousin remembered every single one. How sick your sister got, and no one did anything. Your mother responds, no one knows what TO do. She listens to your sisters faint screams upstairs, and gets more pills. Every day is seizures and screams, every night is a drugged up comatose daughter. The wind picks up the blankets are like sheets. But the story, finish the story. The part you when you got the phone call. The part no one knows.
Unfeeling to life around me, unusually ignorant and angry. At my aunt's house, while my parents are in the hospital with my sister. That phone call with no explanation, only urgency. Her body laying on the cot pale and unmoving. The unsteady rise is the only indication she lives. The medications, they ate her from the inside out, eroding her stomach, terminating her organs. The family comes and says goodbyes, your cousin falls next to the bed ignoring everyone, including you, the last night of his being sober. Christmas a time of joy, forever scarred and always remembered, asked about by others every year. That night. You and your parents lay down to sleep, the steady beeping becomes desperate. You yell to wake them, her eyes are open, staring far, a disengaged look from the world. Your sister struggles for the last breath and exhales, her soul goes with it, as her eyes slowly close. you cling to her cold body whispering, don’t leave me,
I love you KiKi.