12.

sometime around the present

Dad got in after mum last night, so it’s possible he parked her car in (prediction: he has). A glass of water leads to exhaling louder than I intend. I’m not ready for the overflow of light from opening the blinds above the sink. A thin horizontal green panel is the only non-opaque portion of the door. Dad did park mum in. Affirming, annoying. Waking him up equals explanations (from me), assumptions/questions (from him, it’s hard to know which are worse), and complaints (from mum). And I can’t just “take his car”. His keys are not ever accessible unless he wants you to drive him somewhere…

But. There is a car I recognise under the only tree on this street. Sister is leaning against her driver-side door. My watch tells me she’s exceedingly early, but that may be because the watch is broken. I thought the new protocol was meet at the café. I guess we haven’t got coffee since she moved. I frown. Are we even capable of being drive-to-the-café-together people at the moment? She runs a hand through her hair. She is using headphones. Corded headphones. Hrmmm.

I practice a face once - eyebrows slightly raised, mouth open-ish - in the hallway mirror. I place the watch on my desk. I slide out the drawer, lift up the panel revealing the secret compartment, ignore the ungiven envelopes, and retrieve ‘the cry list’. I thumb over the creases, the tear. I feel like 2018 has been replaying itself these past few weeks. Recycled as a more melancholic version of a previous time, with mildly more empathy for my family, but a significantly less present sister. Does she even remember the list? Why would she otherwise assert we were having coffee in response to my message? But why would the list register as important to her? I put the paper back in the compartment. I scratch the back of my neck. I pick up a ball. I open the door to sister’s room, bounce the ball against the wall and catch it. I unfold my hand, and the bounces echo. I close the door.

She is leaning against the fence. She turns around.

“Oh. Hi.” I say.

She takes her headphones out. “My car.” OK.

No one says anything. The last time I was in this vehicle, everyone was saying everything. Except mum, who was being compared by those in the car to a distant family member who - as brother had found out at the engagement party we were at - had written a manifesto in anger to their partner for being an “unyielding” person. Except mum, because she was driving the beekeeping equipment across the bridge.

I can outlast sister in this silence. She initiated coffee. Still. How often does an atypical feeling have to be in the air before it becomes the atmosphere? As if this silence between sister and I were an overplayed remix or cover, so much so that when, after discovering the old CD wedged between artefacts of who you were, feeling the cracks and dust as you push your right thumb along the plastic case, blowing on the disc before inserting it into a CD player (if you have one, and even then if you can find it), the notes, the timing, the instrumentation your mind anticipates are synchronised with the cover rather than the real thing.

I glance behind me, a few thick books in a pile on one seat, some takeaway food bags in the footwell on the other side.

She skips a few songs in a row, at the 0:01 mark of each, because they are (I presume), in order: too happy for the conversation we might have; too industrial for this time of day; too long for this car trip; and too transparently vulnerable. She sighs, opens her mouth, tells the car what to play. I turn my head left and smile. She did say a long time ago that if we weren’t allowed to open our mouths I would be the smarter one. A person walking their dog on the footpath is wearing long odd socks.

The pop-ish song she’s chosen involves a violin at some point, and a vocalist disappointed with their cup of tea (although I suppose it’s not really “about” the tea).

She reverse parallel parks with fluid movement from resting to left-hand down to right-hand down. The same rhythm as she always has. Mum doesn’t like this coffee shop because it’s an order-from-the-front-even-if-you’re-eating-in café. They do “exceptional” coffee according to sister (I’m still only able to refer to coffee with adjectives such as “hot”, “small”, and “second”), and regardless, she doesn’t do sit down these days. Or at least, we don’t.

She orders for both of us without giving me a chance to use my adjectives. I lean against a wall. The barista asks her something.

“Takeaway.”

She looks in the right pocket of her skirt, before paying with the phone already in her hands. She walks away from the counter. I raise one eyebrow. She opens her mouth, and closes it without having spoken.

She flips the phone over in her hands without using it.

We receive coffee. I whisper “thanks”. Sister’s ears move back quickly and return. She pockets her phone.

We walk. The Sun is no longer in our eyes. She is on my left, between me and the river.

My hand shakes. Coffee does not activate this swiftly. What does is thinking about how a thing fades: at the end, as with the last note of a song; or by overuse, as with the first keyboard mum received, from her grandpa, which she couldn’t afford to fix; or by underuse, as with a band member who quietly decides they can wait no longer for their bandmates to acknowledge them; or by isolation, as with the only unbroken string on a guitar at a concert.

She switches the coffee to her left hand, rubs her eyes with her right hand, plays with her pocket.

She sips the coffee, exhales. “Why did you message me?”

“Why did you message back?”

“Oh come on.”

“What?”

She sips her coffee. Eye contact. “Look, I know you discovered the list. Mum shared with me regarding the bees and your 'atypical' questions. Moreover, why else would you communicate with me, proactively, about crying?”

With this family every day is a cycle, me orbiting a mailbox, and whenever I spend time with mum, dad, or brother one-on-one, talk to them, see their complexity, I fly closer and closer to the opening of the mailbox, and whenever I hear a story about them, or from them, my orbit shifts me away, where I can see the mailbox no longer. “How do you always end up having these conversations? You haven’t even been home.”

“I am aware I have been cool and distant lately, but I care about this family.”

“You can’t do this thing where we are having a conversation and you assert you’re cool. That isn’t cool”.

“You can’t do this thing where you keep lying to us.”

‘Us,’ as if they were a band and I were a singer-songwriter, and the world were a critic, a judge, reviewing with a higher ceiling for groups rather than individuals. “This is a universally held family opinion?”

”No. OK. It is not a you and us situation. I am the only one who knows. But everyone feels… your withdrawal, it…“

“Are you…” I know this is every kind of logical fallacy: slippery slope; false dichotomy; straw-person; etc. and certainly not what she was saying, but because she can articulate me better than I can, even the implication unsettles, “are you suggesting I be more like…?”

“No. I want you to stop permitting this distance between yourself and people who care about you.”

“But maybe some people are not close to their families, maybe some people are just distant?”

“You are not accurately describing what is happening here.”

“What is happening here?”

“It happens when you disappear down the hallway when you get home. It happens when you ignore that old brother is actually asking you for help, when you can give him something I cannot. It happened when you never brought J. to family dinner.”

I don’t say anything.

She raises her left palm in front of her body. I nod. “Some secrets are worth protecting, I agree. I deeply believe that. I know it. But do you ever think you want this family to be different?”

The weight of a word. Words unsent, the envelopes and letters anchoring my desk. Words stolen, as they would be if dad discovered an envelope in my room with his name on it in during one of his cleaning sprees. Like sister giving away words that didn’t belong to her. “Is the list a demonstration that there is nothing to hide from you in this family?”

She fiddles with the right pocket of her skirt, pulls out her headphone case. “I…” She closes her eyes, sighing. Words unsaid, the ones that fill the valley between sister and I. She moves the case to the left pocket. “There was an album we shared with four CDs, all of which required play simultaneously.” I wiggle my toes in my shoes, willing any possibly perceivable intrigue away from my face. Of course I remember. “The album was incomprehensible if you were only listening to one of the CDs. We heard only a portion of the story. One might have felt joy was being hidden. So, you cannot live a life where you only show m—, where you only show us one or two of the CDs.”

“I mean, that album was impractical.” Although that quality stood alongside chaotic, thought-provoking, and multi-experienceable (a word which sister taught me).

She turns her head sharply towards me, with eyes narrowed, and then gently moves it towards the water.

“OK yes, but do we ever get anyone’s full story? We don’t know all the unconscious factors that influence other human beings. We don’t even know ourselves, how can we know other people? I don’t even have all the CDs of me that are out there. There’s so much complexity to us.”

“But that is not why you choose not to try.”

She pauses, I assume leaving space for me to interject, to play my beat, to give a clue. I don’t.

“OK.” She exhales. “I will re-imagine my analogy, as you often do. Family is risking playing the album without all the CDs. Family is risking the existence of misunderstanding. Of different interpretations of you spreading. The interpretation is slanted because someone is too close to one speaker. Because they were missing two CDs. Because you did not share the story emotionally 'enough' for them. Because they were too distracted thinking about what they want for you. But to believe in any interpretation of you at all, for you to care about m—, about us, for us to care about you, even if not the exact perfect interpretation, you have to make some noise. At least one CD has to be playing.”

I sigh. Words cried, like the song an album begging for a friend to find hope again as the chord progression shifts. “What you’re saying resonates with me. I want to share. I sit at my desk in my room thinking, writing, typing the words that feel like they could make things be different. But how can I share with anyone in this family if I can’t trust you?”

She nods.

She stops, sets her empty coffee on the ground. She reachers into her right pocket and pulls out her phone, flips it over once, twice, again. She places it face down on her left palm, removes the case. Part of a creased, one edge torn paper, rises up slightly, as if it had space to breathe. She puts the paper between her right index and middle fingers, and moves it towards me.

I unfold it.

If these weeks were an album, this scrap of paper would be the devastation song.

“When I told dad…. This is not an attempt to justify my behaviour. I opened the door to the vehicle, to transport dad to the airport. He was crying. They had fought about… well you saw the list, and you know them. He searched for tissues in the centre console. He noticed the CD, and the note from J., and enquired. I imagined him shuffling to the car alone to cry. It reminded me of you, that instinct to disappear in one’s sadness, not the crying. So the words escaped.”

I nod. It was as if when she was dropping dad off that day she was—, or as if in my response I was, we were dropping our friendship off at the airport, letting it take a plane, or ourselves taking separate planes, creating the kind of distance that grows insularity, and assumptions about what’s actually on the ground between you.

“I am deeply aware of how that could have made you feel. I intended to share. I prepared a note. Then you cried at the concert, and shared a fake reason why. I cried. I wrote the list. Over time, with no acknowledgement from either of us, I allowed my sadness to persuade me that you needed to mature, that I needed time in your absence, but that this was who we were.”

I sit. My right arm, holding this fragment of the cry list, hovers over my heart. I open my mouth. “I’m sorry…” She sits. I close my eyes, breathe out, run my hand along the grass. “I’m sorry for how little music I have shared with you since 2018.”

“I am sorry I did not share with you that I told dad, and that I assumed what you needed. Which even if you did need it, I assumed it. I did not ask.”

“Thank you.”

We allow the river, the wind, some passing traffic to create the only noise.

The wind snatches her cup. I catch it.

“Why were you around for everyone crying?” I ask.

“Some amalgamation of one, being a more open person than you, and yet two, more trustworthy than brother, and three, probably luck, or randomness.” I nod.

“Additionally, this family, well… three of ‘us’, provide abundant opportunities to be present when people cry.”

“These last few weeks, it has felt like the same tears have resurfaced.”

“Crying does belong to this family.” We laugh. She taps her fingers along the grass. “Although… I suppose this time we were not as close through it.”

I smile. “Do you often want things to be different?”

“This is not where I land, but on occasion I start out imagining we were all different people.”

“Every time I listen to some of those old songs of ours I feel like I’m a minorly different person to the last time. Some months I could feel how far away I was, from you, from everyone, in the way I would respond.”

She moves her hand towards me, then herself. “I would not wish a different interpretation of our family where we don’t have this.”

“I wish I told you I was sad you were moving out of home. Can we do this next week?”

She nods. “The past few years were harder because I was navigating them without the clarity of our friendship. Thank you for saying that now.”

I wave at her. She waves back, smiles.

I shake my head. “I didn’t mean only what I said about that album.”


“I know. You would suggest it is too conceptually rich for that.” She says. I laugh.

I open my palm. “Did you have this behind your phone since 2018? Has it been there the whole time?”

“No, I only placed it there when I moved out. It was previously stored in a secret compartment in my desk.”