The smell of grief was all around me. It was everywhere. Does grief even have a smell? I think it does. It smells like damp grass and old dresses and rainy weather. But it wasn't raining. It had already stopped when my father and some other men carried the coffin to the burial place. I knew then, more than I could ever know that this was real. The death was real, the absence was real, the pain was so very real.
It was real like dreams are real while you are dreaming. Somehow I felt like I was watching my own funeral from a third person perspective, like I were a cloud or a ghost. Probably a ghost.
It is not natural for fathers and mother to put a daughter six feet under. But few people can relate to the agonizing feeling of seeing a twin sister go under the ground.
And here I was, red carnations in hand, waiting for my turn to throw some dirt at her. Death is a funny fellow. Sometimes he comes when you're not really waiting for him, when you have almost forgotten that he exists, and sometimes he just lurks around for quite a while before he decides to make a move. He lurked and lurked around my sister for her whole life.
He was almost our friend now, mine and hers, the type of friend you don't really want to have close by, but since he must, you welcome him.
I remember yesterday. Well, of course I do. It was freaking yesterday. What I mean to say is that I remember yesterday as if it was happening right now in front of me, and I knew those memories would last me a lifetime.
She was pail and broken. Nothing unusual there. She had been pail and broken her whole life. Well, not all of it, but almost. My mother said she looked healthy and normal until she was two, but that doesn't really means a lot to me because as far as I can remember, we where always in and out of hospitals.
She was a miracle for surviving 22 years and that was all because of me. I was her identical twin, her perfect match. I gave her my blood, I gave her my bone marrow, I gave her a kidney, I gave her a best friend, I gave her a reason to stick by way past what she should have ever stuck.
And somehow that made me a criminal in my eyes. She could have found relief a long time ago, if our almost perfectly identical bodies didn't gave people hope.
I never though hope could be such a dangerous, dark thing.
But death is relief, death is oblivion and with hope, she couldn't have relief.
Laying in her bed, her hospital bad covered in expensive linen that could not disguise the smell of death that impregnated the room, I though of us.
She told me she was done suffering yesterday. I remember because my eyes watered and because you try to remember all the lasts things a dead person told you.
Laying in her bed I though about the places where she could have hidden it. I know she had one for me somewhere in the room.
I looked at the windows and I though she might have written in there with a marker, and then erased it. We both knew that a blow of hot breath would reveal whatever she wrote and erased, an invisible message. I felt limb, though. My legs, heavy with grief, didn't wanted to carry me from her bed to the window.
I though about other places she might have hidden a letter. I knew she wrote letters in her worse moments, wanting for me to have something of her in the future, when she would not be there.
Maybe she duck-taped it under the table. I would probably do that instead of writing in the window. Who knows how long the invisible mark in the glass would last? Would it last enough for me to find it? And it is not like she could stand in her shaky legs for too long.
I though about half an hour ago. Or was it in another lifetime? My hands throwing dirt at her coffin, my mother crying, my father glancing at me furtively, as if I would metamorphose myself into Anne-Claire at any second, but I kept insisting in being Molly. My hands, shaking, placing the flowers in her newly raised tombstone.
Anne-Claire M. Atkins
1988-2010
Beloved Daughter and Sister
And that was it. That's what she was. Just that, nothing more. There was no written proof in her tombstone that she was an amazing photographer, that she fought with a terrible disease that ate her body for twenty year, that she was loved by all, specially by me, that I don't feel like living on without her.
The ceiling of her room wasn't white like in most rooms. I had a blue summer sky painted on it 6 months ago, when we decided it was time to stop fighting. It was time to rest until it happened. Before she came home, I had it painted, so just she had something nice to look at in the hours she was grounded in her bed.
I though again about a good hiding place. My legs felt strong again because I needed my sister, and the only way I would have her would be by reading what she wrote, what was inside her mind before.
I blew in her window and in the bathroom mirror and nothing came of it. There was no letter under the table, under the bed or under any chair. There was no clue that she had left me something, but she had. I knew it, I had to believe in it, or else I would be lost.
I look at the pictures of us scattered through the room. My face, always looking pinkish and healthy, compared with hers, pale and thin. Her cameras were everywhere. I could see at least five. Her newest toy, a EOS 7D Cannon, her newest toy ("I want to take some pictures with this bad boy before I hit the sac" I remember she telling me, when I asked why she needed yet another new camera)
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