One Year of You and I

May 23rd

  Friday, May 23rd, 2014

Holly

  A girl watches over her sister. 

  Constantly watching. 

  She watches the bloody bandage at her side, left there after the surgery, and wonders if it was always that thick with blood or if she had continued bleeding. Finding herself thinking and probably thinking a little too much because now her breathing is becoming heavy and but it’s hard to let out because she has been crying so hard and her throat is filled with a lump and her nose is clogged and she’s too scared to open up her mouth because she’ll either scream or bawl or throw up. 

  She watches her chest rise and fall, not letting her eyes peel away, as she’s terrified that if she does as little as blink she will stop and that will be it and she’ll truly be alone for the first time in her life and the thought of that terrifies her even more. So she continues to have her eyes never move from her chest, always making sure that it slowly but surely goes up and down and up and down and holy shit no no no please no up oh thank goodness and down.

  The very very very few times she lets her eyes flick towards the machine at her mouth that helps this chest rise and fall, she instantly brings them back. She can’t bare it. She couldn’t stand expecting to see brown eyes that were so alive and full of emotion and only see closed lids. It sent pain all throughout her body to see her golden skin now such a dull grey; not even the slightest tint in her cheeks that were usually so rosy. And she absolutely hated the scar on her face. She would look at it, thick and white and standing out, and try to convince herself that it would die down and wouldn’t be so obvious soon. But she knew that it would always be there. She knew that it was a part of her now. And though she knew that her sister was beautiful and that nothing was ever going to change that, she hated the scar because she knew that she could have changed it. 

  She could have stopped it. 

  But she watched everything happen and she didn’t. 

  I sat back in the baby pink seat by Olive’s bed, sighing and biting at my lip. My lips had grown so chapped in the past week. The inside would sting as I had almost bit through it yesterday when I was at the hospital. 

  I had been at the hospital every day since the accident. I would stay until visiting hours were over, sitting in this very chair. Sometimes I would be accompanied by our mom and she would try speaking kind words in order to distract me. Other times Olive’s Barthrow friends would rush in and run around her fragile body and for the first time they actually recognized me and they were flooding me with questions that I really did try my best to answer. There were nurses on other occasions, checking up on her and putting new bandages at her side and tucking her long hair behind her ear. 

  And then there were the times where it was just her and I. 

  I would sit with my homework in my lap, writing out what was probably a false answer every few decades or so, and then I would make sure to watch her again. Just to be sure that she was still there. But then I would go back to my homework because looking at her made my eyes fill up with tears and my legs feel like noodles and my throat to close up and for guilt to become the ocean and for me to drown. 

 Up until the age of six, Olive and I shared a room. We had a bunk bed that sat in the middle of the room with bug-themed bedspreads: hers with a giant red ladybug, mine with a pink butterfly. Olive was terrified of the dark, as the dark is what brought out what hid under the bed at night. Because of this, I gave up the top bunk and let her have it, letting my head rest against the bottom bunk’s pillow every night. Even with this, she was certain that monsters and goblins and whatnot could climb the ladder and reach her. Our beds were small and thin, truly made for only one person, but I climbed the ladder every night, snuggling close to my shaking sister and pulling the sheets up to our chins and leaving my eyes open until her quivering breath finally slowed down, revealing sleep, keeping her safe from whatever lurked in the night.