Time isn’t patient. It isn’t kind.

I thought a lot about how to open this story. I needed some sort of beautifully poetic anecdote to show how she haunts me and will continue to until I die. But the truth is that she finds me in every moment. In every dance performance, every song, every reflection, she sits on my shoulders like a perched raven.

Though I want to tell you this story, I myself am still piecing it together.

But I’ll try. Everyday I try to make sense out of something that is impossible to understand.

My oldest sister lives in Seattle. She’s an artist and a writer. At least that’s what I tell people when they ask how many siblings I have. It’s easier that way. Grief is hard to fit into small talk.

What I don’t say is how I scroll through our old Instagram messages, as if one day she might post again, or maybe those three dots would appear like a glitch in time, a sign she’s still trying to reach me.

I even accidentally called her the other day, and my stomach dropped, like I nearly thought she might answer.

People usually don’t ask again, and I find some of my closest friends don’t know about the girl that sits in my shadow. Sometimes I feel like I’ve become incredibly good at putting that costume on. The costume of someone whole.

And I’m fine. I’ve practiced being fine for years.

Humans don’t think in words first. We think in abstracts, feelings, and visuals. Then we translate them to words to share them with others.

The numbness always blocked my path back to those abstracts. I could think well. I could explain things. I could put logic to my emotions.

So how do I go back to the first step? How do I stop my subconscious from immediately translating and then cutting off?

Well, let’s be logical here and start at the moment my timeline fractured.

My oldest sister, Caroline, killed herself when I was fifteen.

My aunt gifted me a necklace during the winter after it happened. It was a circular pendant of glass, like it should have a dried flower or something inside, but there wasn’t. The glass was just broken.

She explained that it represents women breaking the glass ceiling, and it reminded her of how Caroline so fiercely represented that, how she was unafraid and never backed down from a fight.

So now I hold that broken glass necklace and wonder if maybe I don’t have to be afraid of these shattered pieces. Maybe it needed to be broken. Maybe the broken glass is beautiful enough to be framed instead of swept away.

She comes to me in my dreams, masked from the truth. Usually when I first see her, it’s like it never happened. I hug her and bring her along with me through the dream. Something cracks, and I start to wake up. I try to tell myself that she never died. Somehow I justify to myself that she faked her death and has now come back to me after all of these years. But then I remember.

The first time I saw her after she died, she stabbed me, over and over again. In dreams, I can still feel the pain, the sting in my chest, the violent thrust of her knife, into my heart.

One time she asked if I could forgive her. I told her no, and she said that I was breaking her heart.

I said, “You already broke my heart.”

Time still allows me to visit that memory with her in the summer when she was still using dad’s old van. She blasted her song of the summer “Don’t Take the Money” by the Bleachers. She was driving, and probably should have been more focused on the road, but she hit the wheel with her hands to the beat, shaking her head up and down, her bangs falling around her face. We laughed at the lyrics together. Even if we couldn’t fully understand what it was saying, I felt it in my heart. It was all so her and me. So bold, so beautiful, so desperate for life.

She always teetered on that edge of life. Beautiful, reckless, loving. But look at what happened. I can’t walk that line of life and death, love and reality. I’ve backed myself all the way up to the opposite wall. Don’t even look at it. Don’t watch as it starts to move closer even as I cling to anything I can feel behind me even though I can never go back.

I hold onto any piece of her I still have. I wear her old shirts. I look at her pictures and wish I had taken more videos because I would do anything to remember her as a real person. What did she smell like? Her clothes were always a little salty, like the ocean, but what else was there? What was the sound of her voice? God, why can’t I remember the sound of her voice? What were things she used to say? “That’s bullshit!” or “Fuck it!” But what else?

I conjure up a memory of her, an alive one, not just physically. I can’t let them convince me that after all she lived, all she did, her life surmounts to only her death.

A psychic told me that I can summon her in a mirror. She’s right. When I look at my reflection, sometimes it’s like she’s staring back at me. The curve of my upper lip. The fullness of my cheeks. The squareness of my jaw. The arch of my eyebrow. When I smile, really smile, I have a little dimple like her. I didn’t notice that for a long time, maybe my smile had never been wide enough.

Her college friend told me that I sound like her. That I laugh like her. I record my voice, force a laugh. I put it on repeat for hours until I’m just a maniac listening to the haunted cries of a dead girl. I torture myself to try and hear her in my sound.

But her eyes were more green, less blue. Her eyelid didn’t curve like mine – she’d pointed that out to me once when she taught me how to draw eyes. Her nose sloped down more. Her hair was blond, thick, and straight.

She’s not hiding behind the glass in the mirror. I am.

In movies, suicide victims almost always leave a note, an explanation for why they did what they did. Why didn’t she leave a note?

She once told me that sometimes she finds herself in a very dark place, but then she’ll get a text from me, and that brings her out of it. Why didn’t she text me? Why didn’t I text her?

They tell me she committed suicide. No, don’t call it that. She didn’t commit a crime. She killed herself.

I make myself watch Youtube videos about suicidal people. I try to understand why they want to do it. She told me once that people who kill themselves actually usually have thought about it for a long time before, and it’s not spontaneous. Did she think about it for a long time? Had she been texting me in those weeks before planning to leave me the next?

What was she thinking in those last moments? She must have felt so sad, so lonely. I wonder if she thought of me as her heart slowed. Part of me hopes she did, that maybe those last breaths could be happy, that maybe she’s happier now. But part of me prays she didn’t, that she had forgotten about me, because if she had been thinking about me, how could she do this?

I try to piece together those last moments in my mind, but I’ve only been told parts of the whole story. She and her boyfriend had fought. He left, and when he came back, she was dead. No one tells me fully how, but she somehow choked herself on part of her RV. My mom describes it as a position someone shouldn’t be able to get into alone. Was she that committed to it that she would struggle into that? Or did he lie?

There’s too many parts, too many pieces, too many things I can’t understand. I try to pick up the pieces of glass, but they cut my fingers, and even as I try to align them, I can’t put them back together. Everything looks too similar and too jagged. Looking back at me, my reflection is broken, like it also doesn’t know.

When I was younger, my favorite show was Scooby-Doo. At the end of each episode, they always unmask the bad guy to reveal it was someone they knew all along and not a real monster. It seems so simple.

If only I could find my monster and tie them down long enough to tear off their mask. I wonder who it would be. Who is the villain of this story? Who is to blame for all of this? Maybe it’s her boyfriend. Maybe it’s my family. Maybe it’s Caroline.

Though, I fear I have left their mask on this long because I know the truth. My monster isn’t hiding under a mask. She’s hiding in the mirror. 

As the years continue to pass, I wonder the most about what Caroline would have been like if she hadn’t died.

What if as she fell against the wall, crying, pulling herself into that position, her phone buzzed, and she gave herself one last chance to look at it. What if she saw a message from me, telling her some dumb story about my volleyball game, and she laughed, opened the chat and called me?

Maybe she would have pictured my face, heard a whisper of my voice in her mind, and that would have been enough. Maybe she would have stayed.

Maybe I could have made her stay.

I imagine she would have broken up with her boyfriend and come to live with us. She would have thought it was so cool when I tried aerial dance for the first time. I would have asked her if it was possible to feel the same way about girls as I did about boys, and she would have lovingly teased me for it like an older sister should. She would have come to my high school graduation. We could recreate the photo we had taken at my sister’s graduation but this time with me in the middle, both of them on either side of me, kissing my cheeks. She would have lost her mind when I got into MIT. I can see her screaming, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me, so incredibly proud.

I imagine her publishing her book, and it launching her career. She would travel around the US, writing and drawing new things. She’d come to watch my dance performances every semester. When I hear a new song I think she’d like, I’d send it to her. We would have watched Barbie together, and she would have worn the bright pink sequin Uggs she always had on.

In some of my hardest moments at college, she would have immediately flown up to be with me. That one day, she would have taken me to the hospital and slept next to me, to let me know I was safe in my bed, that she wouldn’t let anyone touch me. She wouldn’t have left me alone like I was.

Maybe one day she’d come to my college graduation. She’d make fun of how awkward MIT students are and fawn over the weird architecture of Stata center.

One day she would come to my wedding, and we’d dance together, laughing and crying.

Maybe she would find a better man and have children with him. They’d have her big green eyes and chubby cheeks. I’d spoil them and let them pull on my hair like she did when I was little.

Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, we’d come together, all of us siblings, and we’d celebrate, like normal families do.

Then years from now, my parents would die, and we would go to the funerals together and hold each other. Years after that, when we are all grey, maybe, then Caroline could die. She would be in her nineties, exhausted after a full life, filled with love, adventure, and time, and I would finally be able to let her rest even though I’d still barely be able to let her go.

One after the other, my brother would leave, then my sister, until it’s just me again, alone. I’d live a few years in that loneliness until one night I close my eyes to sleep, and when I open them again, they’re all there, waiting for me.

But that’s not what happened and not what will happen.

She never saw me grow up. She’ll never see me graduate. If I ever am able to love someone enough to want to marry them, I will hold onto them so tightly to be sure that they are never able to leave me too. On our wedding day, maybe my other siblings will dance with me, and I’ll cry wishing that Caroline could be there too.

If I ever have children, they’ll never know her. I’ll have nightmares every night that they’ll get sad and think the world is better without them. They won’t understand why I sometimes start crying when I hold them.

Time moves too quickly and too slowly. It’s unfair.

How do I keep living when she’s not here to witness it? When she’s not here to live it too? Every year it’s like I have a knife in my side aimed directly at my heart that pushes a little deeper, threatening but never giving me the relief of ending it. It hurts more, when time passes without her. The more I feel less like the person I was when she knew me, the farther I feel from her.

One day I’ll turn twenty-six, and I’ll be older than her. I’ll keep aging. My cheeks will hollow out, my skin will wrinkle, but she’ll still be there, stuck in time, forever twenty-five.

This isn’t an ending. This isn’t the full story. This is where I leave it for now.

How do I keep finding and creating beauty in a world that broke the person who taught me how?

I won’t stop. I keep creating anyway. I find beauty in the fear, the sadness, and the loneliness because missing someone means I am capable of loving. And even if I can’t hold onto her, even if no one holds onto you, I will hold onto myself.

I see her in my own face in the mirror.

I see her in every girl who’s been told they should stay strong.

I see her in every artist who can’t afford to keep trying.

Sometimes all I am is angry at her. Sometimes I want to tell her it’s not her fault. Sometimes I still think it’s mine.

I still struggle to feel, to let go of the numbness that protected me for so long.

Grief is proof we once loved. There are three things that connect me to another person: time, space, and a bond. I lost any way to find Caroline in time and space, but my heart holds onto the bond. I keep reaching, but every time I do she takes a step away.

One day I will reach her. I hope by that time I am ready to face her. I imagine as I inhale one last time, I’ll reach for her hand, and she’ll finally take it. She’ll smile, her dimples showing, her hair long and blond again, and she’ll say, “I missed you, kiddo.” Maybe I’ll be little again, and she’ll hold my hand and walk with me until the end.

– Samantha Belleman

Author’s Note: I began writing this piece in a memoir class I took at MIT, and it turned into a much bigger journey for me. Even seven years after my sister’s death, I still find it challenging to talk about. The arts have been a way for me to express my grief in a way that feels safer to me. This piece in particular aims to portray my internally fractured timeline. It explores how grief can make it hard to believe the past and anticipate a future without someone who had always been there.