Lost To Happiness

Lost to Happiness

The woman sitting in front of me is smiling. It’s a vacant, empty smile. The smile a baby would have, clueless and blissful in ignorance.

“It’s such a lovely day. It’s warm, the sun is shining, it can’t get any better,” she says. Her voice is soaked in pure and simple joy.

It makes my stomach twist and bile rise in my throat. I feel like vomiting, watching this woman smile blankly in the sun. Instead, I force my stony face into a semblance of a smile and agree. We return to complete silence.

The woman wears my sister’s face. She uses my sister’s voice. She has my sister’s touch.

She is not my sister.

My sister has shadows painted underneath her eyes and a furrowed brow. Her mind always runs, sprints, gallops, with endless clever ideas and possibilities. She does not comment on the weather and sit happily in silence. My sister has ambition. And a pressure that whipped her brain into only giving perfection, like a jockey whipping his horse to finish first. Her ambition was inherent. The pressure was a complex, parasitic creature that latched on and sucked her dry. It morphed out of her ambition, anxiety, and our skewed childhood somewhere along the way. It made her neither good nor bad. There were other qualities that decided that.

There was a time of course before she was stolen from me, before there was mounting pressure at all. It coincided with our skewed childhood. Happy pockets of time littered those years; some separated by lengthy stretches, others fell together side by side.

In those days, the sun hated our exposed skin. We tumbled inside, sweat-drenched and dark as ebony without a single care. Water lapped our feet and sand rubbed between our toes before we ran, head first, into rising, salty waves. We shrieked at each other, triumphant glee or sour disappointment bursting from our throats, over endless card games. The wind whistled in our ears as we biked, hands-free, down steep hills. The heavy scent of flowers filled the evening breeze as our mother braided jasmines and marigolds into our hair. She whispered to me in the pitch-black night as we lied in our bed. We muffled our giggles in our blankets. Two feet away, our mother drowsily told us to shut up. Our father was already snoring and dead to the world. She grasped my hand and asked for a story. I weaved her a fantastical tale of magic, the struggle for power, and a battle for peace. Somewhere near the end, still holding hands, we fell asleep.

Suddenly I can’t bear to look at the woman. Blinking furiously, I pretend to consider the beauty of nature as wistful anguish ravages my heart. Eventually, I sigh and turn back to find her looking at me.

“The jasmines are beautiful, aren’t they?” I feel bitter over how mundane her comment is and how easily she swallows my deceit.

“Yeah, they are. Remember when ma used to braid them into our hair?” The woman’s face closes and her eyes flicker. Something like hope rises in my chest. I hold my breath and stare expectantly. My sister hates those times. There were too many poisonous words in harsh voices and raised hands; too many broken bottles, ringing shots, and prejudice. It drove her to excel, to spite everything that pushed her down. But there was too much pain that accompanied our bliss for her to love any of it.

The shadow that crossed her face is destroyed by a relentless light. “Not really, it was such a long time ago and I’m no good for memory. But I’m not surprised that she did - mothers usually do that for their daughters.”

My heart beats hard as it falls - split between anger and grief. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I suppose.” It’s hard to sound emotionless when the woman’s smiling at me but I try my best. Wretched silence falls upon us again.

My sister is almost never quiet with me. Even when we fight and she ignores my existence, it’s all too easy to provoke her into a screeching, fist fight. We did not argue a lot in our youth; that changed, as many things did, when we grew older. We are both obstinate people, so when we did fight it was war. As children, I only had to wait until the apartment was empty for us to reconcile; a common circumstance as both our parents worked long hours. It was hard for her to ignore my apologies in a one bedroom apartment; especially when she was expected to care for me as the eldest. Later in life, especially while she was far away in university, I would wait weeks and then months for her forgiveness as pressure drove her to hostility. She grew too sensitive and I grew too blatant for us. A wall of our own fury was erected every time we clashed and dismantled every time we made peace.

The woman is sweet and innocent as a lamb. There is nothing that she is passionate about; nothing that propels her to be livid; nothing that prompts her to search for answers. She is nothing like my sister and the knowledge burns me.

My sister is the pinnacle of academic accomplishment. She had the highest average of her grade in every year of school. Her awards and degrees fill the walls. A stack of her research proposals lay waiting on her desk, as is her work in her own lab. She was accepted into prestigious universities and medical schools under thousands of dollars in scholarships. My heart is yet to stop swelling with fierce pride when I think about her every achievement.

My heart is yet to stop cracking when I think about her every achievement.

It was pressure that shoved her over the edge. There is no other explanation for what happened. Doctors are unsure of what caused her coma. But I know her best and I know that her need for success and everything bad finally suffocated her.

It took seventy-six days of lying in a hospital bed, with shallow breathing and tubes sticking out of her, for her to wake up. She did not panic when she woke up. She calmly laid there as doctors rushed around her. I felt fear slip down my throat as I watched her. My sister demands answers immediately, she overreacts, she becomes hysterical. I was told that her ease was a good sign, that it signified her understanding of what was happening. I let that appease me.

She was beaming contently in her cot as she looked out the window when I was allowed to see her again. The sight disturbed me being so contradictory to my sister. I ran and pulled her into a hug, sobbing into her shoulder, anyway. She embraced me back. For a second I believed everything would be alright.

But then she asked, “I’m sorry, but who are you?”

I fell away from her and screamed.

It has been many years of revulsion, denial, rage, and despair since then. Everyone else has abandoned any hope for my sister coming back. I cannot.

The woman is happy. My sister is happy. It is selfish of me to crave for my sister’s return when she was so unhappy in her own thoughts. But enduring the agony of being without her is too grueling. I look at the woman, my sister, and say, “Hey, we should go back to the house. It’s getting late.”

She smiles, her eyes are amicable and cheerful but lacking all of our history and love. “Yes, you’re right. Let’s go.”

I envelop her into a tight hug before we leave our darkening garden. She hugs me back and tears prick my eyes. There are stars peeking out in the sky now. I want to curse them for doing this to us. I can’t give up on my sister; I need her back.

But she is happy now, joyous even. The thought crawls out of a corner of my brain and brands itself onto my heart. I close my eyes as I feel defeat creep into me.