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there’s a day aelwyn looks up from her spider plant and realises that she hasn’t spoken to her younger sister in four years.
nothing leads up to it. it’s a normal day—she goes to work, shelves some books, comes home, throws a freezer meal in the oven for dinner, gets comfortably high, and washes her dishes before the drugs kick in. her cats are fed. her plants have new growth on them, which at least means it’s not too late to salvage them after she didn’t water them for three weeks straight during her last depressive episode. she’s got no plans tonight other than making a strong cuppa and sitting down in front of some really shitty reality television. and then her eye catches the date.
she’s been out of her parents’ grasp for nearly a decade, and, begrudgingly, seeing a host of mental health specialists for the last half of that. she resents the docs, resents the drug cocktail they prescribe her, but resents herself unmedicated more. it means that the last time she saw adaine, she’d been receiving treatment for just over a year.
her little sister had come to visit, emotional support animal in tow. technically, it had been on aelwyn’s invitation. to be more accurate, it had been on her first therapist’s strong recommendation, and aelwyn had gone along with it to prove that she was fine, actually, and didn’t need any of this therapy bullshit.
her little sister’d been standing at the airport, right outside the doors. in one hand she’d held a battered suitcase, one aelwyn’d known for certain had not come from their parents. under the other arm was the carrier containing her frog. her jeans were rolled just too high at the ankles, like she’d gotten surprised by the fact of her own capability for continued growth. her glasses had new frames. her hair was a different length. she’d looked so much like their mother that aelwyn’d had to pull over two doors before her to throw up over a trash can.
they’d driven home in silence, aelwyn letting her fear curdle into a much more familiar rage. she’d cursed out the traffic, letting her hands white-knuckle on the wheel while adaine looked out the window. let her feel like an imposition, she’d thought to herself. let her feel like a burden. let her feel ashamed for making me come pick her up, for forcing me to drive her home.
she’d holed herself up in her room, unable to leave its confines. she’d paced, punched a pillow, distracted herself by watching hours of television on her laptop. she’d refused to think about what her younger sister must’ve been doing on the other side of the wall, sitting alone in her living room. she’d refused to acknowledge the shame.
she sometimes wonders if their parents knew what they were doing, did it purposefully. who is she kidding? of course they did. pitting adaine and aelwyn against each other must’ve been like a sport to them. they must’ve delighted in it.
aelwyn, when she thinks of her childhood, mostly remembers a very acute, pervasive fear. it’d still taken her nearly the whole first year of therapy to even admit that she’d had it less-than-ideal as a young child, because her parents technically treated her very well. it’d taken another year after that before she was even willing or ready to look into c-PTSD.
“well it’s not like i’m the one all fucked up in the head,” she’d tried saying to her therapist once. “it’s always been addy who couldn’t keep it together.”
“remind me why you’re here again?” her therapist’d asked. in the silence, aelwyn had refused to make eye contact, inspecting her fingernails. her therapist’d sighed, exhaling through her nose.
“from what you’ve told me,” she’d started, “you watched your parents constantly enact tremendous physical, emotional, and verbal abuse on a family member. in your own words, they used to, quote, ‘torment and humiliate addy for their own sick fucking kicks,’ unquote. you don’t think that had any impact on you as a young person?”
aelwyn’d scoffed. “i wasn’t that young,” she’d said, dismissive. “and i used to kick her when she was down plenty, myself.”
her therapist’d looked very sad. she’d lowered her folder of notes, leaning in. “aelwyn,” she’d said, “being manipulated into abusing a sibling in order to keep yourself safe is still abuse.”
aelwyn’d grimaced, looking out the window. “they never could’ve hurt me the way they did her,” she’d tried.
“i don’t believe that for a moment,” her therapist’d said. out the window, a crow tried to dig fries out of an abandoned brown paper bag on the side of the road. a car went past. the bird hopped out of the way. “not only would they have not hesitated to treat you the exact same way, but it’s also not about that. it’s about the way you felt when you were six, ten, fifteen—you believed they could. that’s the part that does the real damage.”
at that point, the bird had hopped straight back into the road, indifferent to the cars continuing to run along it. so desperate for some cheap, shitty fries—what a pathetic existence.
“just some food for thought,” her therapist’d finished. “for homework this week, i’d like to discuss some tools for responding to thoughts like that with self-compassion, and then we’ll check in how things are going next week. alright?”
it’s been one of a million little things she’s been forced to pick up since starting therapy—things like decoupling shame, like regulating nervous system elevation, like recognising that her parents’ treatment of her was abuse. she can’t fucking stand it. they loved her every minute of every day. they told her all the time the ways in which they were proud of her accomplishments. and every single one of those things was conditional. she knows they were conditional, because at best, when she was useful to them, they let kalina groom her for a chance at power, and at worst, when she wasn’t, they tried to murder her and her sister in cold blood.
there are a lot of horrible things to have come out of her parents’ abuse. chief among them is aelwyn’s lack of control over her own mind; the way bad nights turn into emotional flashbacks turn into psychosis, the way she’s unable to let a single person in normally, the way she can’t accept positive affirmation no matter how badly she’d like to because it’s so much more dangerous to not know when the other shoe is going to drop. there are the physical health impacts, too: the way her joints ache after a couple minutes of standing, ache worse after even fewer of sitting, ache worst after a night of lying down—it drives her up a wall. she’s had more stomach ulcers in the last decade than most people have had in their lives. but the worst, the greatest loss, is that she will never be able to look addy in the eye.
she knows she loved her once, when they were very, very young. she must’ve cared for her, because if not, what kind of older sister was she? but then, of course, addy became a pariah, and it wasn’t safe to associate with her any longer. and that fear without any understanding or explanation became resentment, and then a kind of hatred born from seeing addy get to be herself instead of having to be an extension of their parents to do with as they pleased. she was tormented for it, of course, but it was a freedom that aelwyn could never have been allowed. and so she let her hate consume her, harden her to the way adaine was treated. there was no other way to survive.
that’s what it comes down to. to survive, aelwyn cannot possibly interact with adaine or her new family or her new friends or her new life. the identity she’s been constructing in adulthood, new and fragile, cannot withstand the blow.
she didn’t know how to explain it four years ago. they’d had one honest conversation about their horrible parents, during which aelwyn had plied her underage sister with wine and overfilled her own glass in an attempt to make it bearable, and then she’d offered addy enough money to get an uber back to the airport three days later. she’d never reached out again. aelwyn doesn’t usually think about it, and certainly never lets herself think about it sober. there’s enough shame there to bury her if she lets it.
the water she’s been pouring into her spider plant overflows and spills all over her floor, soaking her sock and puddling into the carpet. she spits out a series of curses, hastily righting her watering can.
that’s it—weed alone is not going to be enough. aelwyn stalks to the kitchen, of a mind to get cross-faded and turn on the loudest tv show she can find. any significance to the date is hers to forget. she owes it to her parents.