a little piece i wrote hope you enjoy
“Today we gather to remember a daughter, a sister, a friend.” The eulogist speaks as if he knows me. As if they understand what I had been through. But he doesn’t, and they’ll never know me. They speak of me as if I was somebody to be remembered. But I'm just the one who drowned in the monster my parents created, because nobody heard me over the siren.
I was never paid attention to as a child, there had never been time. I’d always been the easy one. Or at least I had been the easy one. I was expected to live up to the success my siblings couldn’t. My life was built on concrete pedestals, not for me to stand on, but because someone had to climb. So whilst my siblings took up more and more space, I learned to shrink into the corners they left for me. There was no room in a home that was already crowded with their struggles.
My eldest sister looks vacantly at my wooden box. She sits there alongside my father, as if she’s watching a stranger's life pass by. At some point maybe we did become strangers, because she had always been consumed by something else. Something that needed everything my parents had.
My mother wipes a tear away, clutching her damp cloth between her fingers until it’s something unrecognisable. A mangled knot of guilt that’s feasting. That parasite that once dug its sharp teeth, has found a new home. My mother does not sob, she does not cry. She just sits there, as though stillness meant that parasite might find someone else to bother.
I used to be just like her, holding everything inside because silence was all I ever knew. Staying quiet kept me safe. Although unlike my mother, I could never stay still.
Moving had been my grace for as long as I could remember. I filled my afternoons with endless commitments that kept me away from home, drowning out my problems. If my head was full, so were my hands. Like a washing machine on a never-ending cycle. I’d keep turning, convincing myself that those feelings would wash away. That monster wouldn’t gnaw at me without fight. So I escaped.
It was there that I learnt to play the part, because pretending is what they taught me. It’s ironic how small I made myself to earn a role in their play. I was the child trapped behind glass, I had been strong for everyone else, I wore that mask just like I was told. They introduce me as the child who raised herself, but in truth there wasn’t enough time to go around. I never understood why their love was conditional. It always seemed so easy to love. So as the monster would breathe its drowning fog over my glass, my parents would wipe it away with their sleeves.
I don’t leave a note because I don't know what to say. Would I yell and scream at you for never seeing me? For pushing me aside to make space for the problems you had ignored? Would I resent you for letting me be the child without a parent, even when I needed you the most? There’s no point. You never heard me. Make no mistake because I am not the invisible child, I am just the child you chose to see through. So I try to call out and tell them, but I am once again swallowed whole by the monster. My mother used to tell me it was useless to scream over the siren. I finally understand her now because I drowned, and nobody even noticed.
I spent my whole life behind glass. But now that I’m gone, do you finally see me?
