An Apology

By Lily Kairis

It doesn’t come around often, but when it does, it stings. 


“I didn’t know you had a sister!”
Shock and innocent surprise, innocent curiosity, 

“Why don’t you ever talk about her?”
And then – ouch.
I whisper my reply like an apology, “It’s complicated.”


I lie in bed later that night, the toes of one foot curled up against my other ankle, my
stomach sunken like river stones into the mattress, my eyes on the bedroom fan. I
watch it turn, and I see dust there, caked up on the edges of the off-white plaster.
And suddenly, I feel unclean. Dust in my chest, dust on the corners of my heart, dust
and sin and wrong and weird and strange and different, dustdustdustdust –

I don’t want it anymore. I want to be clean.

So I find your face in the blankness of the air and I say it –

I’m sorry.

God.


I want you to know that I’m sorry I don’t talk about you. I’m sorry I don’t tell my
friends your name, I’m sorry that I brag to them about my cool environmentalist older
brother and my outgoing father and my sweet, sensitive mother, but I don’t tell them
about you. I’m sorry that I don’t bless them with the weight of your presence, and the
spark you used to bring me when I was a kid. I’m sorry I don’t tell them about your
favorite manga and the year you were obsessed with U2 and the way you danced
barefoot on concrete in the summer and all the words you taught me in Swahili. “Ska”
means white. I’m sorry I don’t tell them about how you’d run around our house with
your arms thrown backward like a makeshift cape, and you’d look like, no matter
what, the world couldn’t destroy you. I’m sorry I don’t tell them how you’d stay up
late telling me about everything you loved, everything you knew, about U2 and manga
and soccer and Swahili, and I felt so special, I felt so important, so needed, so loved. 



I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. 


But there’s – something else.



I look at the blades of the fan as they spin into nothingness, as the dust skips down
onto my sheets, like snow, like dirt, like impurity.

I remember your face the night you broke. 




You screamed so much your voice turned wire-thin, thin and high when you yelled,
“I’m going to kill myself.” and your pupils were blown like saucers, and you made
threats I wouldn’t let myself understand. You ripped down the bead curtain by the fan
in my room without even thinking, would even considering me. Later, I found you,
lying on the upstairs bed, hair a golden-brown halo against the pillow. I stroked back
your hair with my tiny fingers, my twelve-year-old baby tiny fingers, and I told you:
I’m sorry. I listened to your words blur into sticky nonsense and though I didn’t
understand, wouldn’t let myself understand, everything that knocked around in the
halo-ed mystery of your head, I told you: It’s going to be okay. You’re okay. You’re
okay.

I look at the blades of the fan turn once, twice, three times. It only took two more
years for you to leave. You hadn’t considered me then, either. You didn’t ask. You just
left, like the dust that skips down from the fan and whirlwinds into the oxygen,
invisible, absent.

When people ask me about you, I wish it all were different. 


I wish I could tell them you were around, I wish I could tell them I saw you, I talked to
you, I wish you were actually sure of how old I was. I wish you’d come home for
Christmas. I wish it all didn’t hurt me this much. I wish I wish I wish -- 



But –
Margaretta,
The thing is, 

I’m not sorry.
I’m not sorry for the dust. I’m not sorry you exist. I’m not sorry that I’m strong
because of it.

So when people ask, I tell them, it’s complicated.”

And it is.
But I will not apologize
for this.