Sister Moon

by Kirsten Miller

  My sister dreamed what it was to be me. To be me. Gutless. A cold fish with staring eyes slit along the belly, anus to gills, with the sharp edge of a silver knife. Gutless. There it is again. Entrails make a bloody path of guilt through this life. What it is to be me. I learnt to breathe only after the knife went in. I learnt to breathe, and imagined my own death. To abstain from life with the hearts of my father and my sister inside of me. I was not this. The hammer falls with the blow of the dice and it is I who am left counting the remaining numbers, deciding whose time is really up. I cannot let her go. I must say goodbye. Claim my own life. I cannot let them go.

  When Catherine came to me with fruit for eyes I plucked them out and ate them, swallowed whole those orbs of juice for fear the world might see what I dreamed all my life to conceal. A blight upon my father’s world, I was always broken. He was that before she came to orbit around the planet that was him, demanding light and peace and stability. He spun her childhood into threads of gold while I waited; he wove her a world with yellow-stained fingers and I dreamed I could hide forever in the crevices of his face; those hands of magic that held me up to the wanting moon, his own kind of sacrifice. He promised me the sun that would absolve him and then submerged my fragile being into the dark of infinite space, my world of mud in a night of stars. Let go. He released me into the waves with his weakened hands because time dictates that, demands it from the pale hold of parenthood: that children shall rise and call the spirits of their fathers all they have created on their own.

  I don’t need life now. He stole the world from me and in turn I take it from her. I no longer need to breathe and now the only way it can be so is to crack open what was sealed forever with the soldered iron of family secrets.

  Would my father trust her still if she took him away, would he forgive her if she buried him with the sands of our secrets, and my own pure hands? I wanted to breathe but I choked on the sunshine, rendered terrified by the abyss of the future below. I could not stand in the hands of time and tell a lie, or pretend that darkness was a dream for the sake of my own sister. But in my dreams is another kind of life, one that breathes, one where I walked the earth more strongly than in the one where I was living. I stole it from her. I stole the ground beneath her feet, and now I peer down from the skies, and I watch her trying to walk.

  3.

  Galileo went blind from gazing at the sun too long. Was he caught in mysterious wonder, or transfixed by an unhealthy obsession? What is loved can also destroy; there are many who lose their sight in much the same way. Horus, child of Isis and Osiris, the falcon-head with impeccable vision who saw everything with both the sun and moon for his eyes. Here was a balance and perhaps the two heavenly bodies were equal then; but was it ever this way? The sun and the moon. My sister Catherine, and me.

  The rhythmic ball of celestial fire creates the days and the seasons – oh, the dependable sun! The comfort she brings is constant and persists no matter what transpires on the earth, she will always rise as the world’s most reliable illumination. The open wound, a world that prays to the heavens for salvation, and if the sun didn’t show itself then all things ever more would be in turmoil, an unenviable darkness.

  There are many nights of no moon, but who really does notice? Who looks up and really cares when the moon is not there? When the creamy orb is full all eyes are heavenward, people stare in wanderlust and longing at the dreaded beauty that comes tainted with her echoes of the wolf, her own touch of what goes too deep. They howl silhouetted at her feminine wiles, a body of phases that can never contain themselves to be constant like the sun. Waxing and waning, she may be full or she may be in crescent, and all around people run from her dark side. In ancient times the hunters relied on her light to mark their way, to provide their bounty in a seemingly endless cycle. Only as the world became more ordered did those who drew up the calendars start looking towards the iridescent sun. I the moon, mistress of every man’s broken dreams, I contain the secrets to their forgotten love. I was there before they knew how to name me, calling the heart songs from the breast of the beast. I never sought to be anything more than I am, but what made them afraid was the darkness that is necessary for my own illumination. So much easier to wait for the day, to turn your face towards the light and the warmth that sinks deep into your skin. I came first, and will stand forever in the shadow of the world and wait for men to acknowledge that they with their hearts sing of a perpetual longing. I will always whisper what the world wants to be forgotten, but the sun and her strength will be revered primarily, and all along.

  4.

  I’ve died before. Once, when I fell into the water, and then again when his spell was cast. I died repeatedly under his hands as a lamb chosen and sacrificed, gazing up at the purity of white ceiling while he sliced me open, again and again. I was thirteen and I had no voice to speak with, and they had no time to notice. There was colour in the night, different shades of darkness that made patterns against my desperate eyelids. The dark was vivid with waking dreams, nightmares too bright to ever fall asleep alongside, but it was the day that was dull and washed out, grey and pallid like the rings beneath my eyes, the dark circles that grew from endless nights of wakefulness and fearful waiting. The daytime was safe at least, and then I could sleep.

  I thought I could return to that house, to find out what I’d lost when I was still a child. I stood at the door with a small bag in my hands, filled only with what I could not imagine living without. A toothbrush, a pen, pieces of blank paper. Everything else could go. I wanted to see why age made a difference, why damage could be done to a child and yet when we are grown we must take it as a part of being a woman. The horror lies in that I might have loved him. Perhaps I almost did.

  My idea of love is by necessity no longer close to anything that is normal. I live half in madness, half in shame. I want to recover myself, to make things right between Catherine and me but then I remember that half of me was born in this desolate place. How do we live a whole life in a country we cannot come back from? How does one come back from this, when the shadow is always there, waiting like a seven headed snake for what it rightfully owns? I couldn’t go to that lonely place again. I couldn’t go anymore, I had to belong to someone.

  Catherine would never understand. They thought I could just snap out of it, that I owed it to them to stand up and be human and alive. They didn’t know that it was a physical thing, something in my head and in my body, all of the time. Mostly though, it was in my chest. It came as a rock where my heart should have been and I don’t mean it as a metaphor. It felt like a stone, a physical pressure and it hurt. It ached worse than anything. Don’t think I don’t know what I did to this family; what I did to them all. Don’t think that I don’t feel guilt, and shame, and responsibility, that I don’t envy them. Catherine became something, a person with the softest heart, able to live an independent life. She has someone who loves her, she has a child, work, and a life to call her own. My own life was claimed a long time ago. I want to shake her to wake her up. To embrace it, to live in it. She has never known what it is to live with death, where death alone becomes your friend and seems to be an easier option than to continue to pretend to the living. I have always loved her, always looked at her with awe and wondered what it would be like to be her. To get up and face herself every day. To have the means to create things, to have a house, to love a man, to paint her walls purple if she wants to.

  I knew the burden that I was. I knew the unfair weight of my presence on our parents in their own house when they should have been free of their children, when they should have been living their own lives. I was still there every day and night, begging them in the only way I knew how for a chance at life. But I couldn’t take all the responsibility. I was their nemesis, the unsolved mystery, and still I don’t blame them. People love in the way that they know how, and I eventually became an adult. Every day they looked at me and wondered what had happened, where they went wrong. I didn’t know if there was any
thing left in that life that could make me well again, and I couldn’t fight anymore. Until I died I longed for the kind of protective love that I saw from a distance, but that I never found. I was tired, and I wanted to go home.

  5.

  Then there’s something else about the moon, about the man who lives there. Just thinking about that makes me laugh. Some people think they can see him there, on the moon’s surface, a big and grinning face. My own family denied his existence except when they had to eat humble pie and live in his house, and then they called him Marshall.

  Mythology can make everything okay. Some say it’s really Cain that people think they can see in there – a man condemned to orbiting the earth forever for killing his own brother. Sometimes the world is so still when clouds lie down like a thick blanket on it, and even expectation disappears when nothing moves. Sometimes I see the world like that, even when the trees reach with their branches and their leaves and beg to be carried with the wind. The dogs make a meal of the meatless bone and the rats scrabble for crumbs left in a cupboard. Sometimes I close my eyes and see the void left by life against the lids. I dream a time before this one, or a time after this that does not hold the image of a discarded self.

  True love is intolerable. True love is transitory and it’s not meant for marriage. It is an ache, a desire and an incompletion, two halves straining towards each other that create a union the completion of which is faulty, incomplete by its very nature. Real love will always yearn, want, dream. It’s the mystery, the hidden self that cries for recognition. The other sees that there is another self, but once discovered it is no longer hidden. No more yearning. The secret is out. Love, true love, is lost.

  6.

  I see beauty and I see trees. I see land and love locked in by an unforgiving sea. I see my sister, sometimes smiling, often struggling against something over which she has no control. I reach in gently, I blow her a kiss and she shivers, reaches for a cardigan to cover her shoulders. I never meant for it to be so cold. Her child is on the floor, bent over one knee and her pony tail hangs down, almost touching the page. I leave Catherine alone and encircle the small girl instead, I take her hand and gently guide the pencil across the page, her slow-growing smile warms the spaces that make up where I am and I take a risk, I move her hair and touch her shoulder; she shudders too.

  ‘Mom!’ she says. ‘Look what I drew!’

  If I still had tears I would enfold her within them. I can only clasp at the clouds and wring them, bring forth a short shower of rain.

  Catherine moves to the child, encircles her with an arm and looks long, looks lovingly. That’s how she used to listen to my poetry too. “Who is that?” she says, her eyes fastened with pins to the page.

  The child shrugs.

  ‘She’s beautiful. She looks like you,’ Catherine says.

  This I am allowed. Before Hayley even had a face I was in there, etching my own features, the always-reminder for my sister. As Hayley grew I watched my own legs lengthen, I curled my fingers in her hair until spirals formed, and I made her look like me.

  I had my own child once; or the idea of her at least. There was something small that divided inside of me, a peanut-size too tiny to yet make a dent against my river-flat belly. The seed of a child was cloaked in a thick river of shame, and it was gone almost as soon as it was there. I knew it existed before my bleeding stopped, and I knew I had to tell him.

  He fetched me from the house on a morning after the school bell had already rung. His car sleek, black, like horse or the shape of night. He wrapped me on the front seat in a woollen shawl taken from the top of my cupboard. He swallowed hard and I watched the egg in his neck move up and down, the thing that made his voice that was now silenced with his shock. He had no words for me. He had other things for me, always, but no words now.

  The building was white and clean with humming lights and gleaming floors. We went in through a back entrance and women in white uniforms wrapped me up in soft words, cajoled me into lying flat upon a white-clad table. There was a coldness, and it hurt me. I bit my lip and I refused to cry. I was colder than the wind. He was outside and waiting, darker than the rain clouds that would come later to drop themselves on the world. I thought of Catherine at school, sitting at her desk with her pencils and ruler, making her mistakes and rubbing them out, and the only marks left for her would be dark smudges on a white page of writing.

  It was quick and it was done, and they spoke to me with straight faces of blood and of pain and of water and of protection. I felt so light that if they breathed too close I would be blown away on that wind.

  On the way home he stopped at a corner shop and bought me a can of Coke and a packet of brown toffees that had grown sticky in the wrappers from being on the shelf too long. I ate three before he dropped me back at the house. He reached for my hand as I reached for my bag but I pulled away. ‘If your parents find out you know what will happen,’ he said.

  I nodded. I wanted to go to sleep. If he would just let me go.

  We learned about the structure of a flower at school and I bled through my dress and onto the seat. ‘It’s that time,’ I told them and it wasn’t a lie because they didn’t know exactly what time I meant. It was that time and they gave me a corridor pass to go home early. I caught a bus alone and when I got to the house he was there, alone. He opened the door and whispered an apology into my hair. He carried me up the stairs and washed me in the shower and then he put me to bed. He sat still and quiet as a stone, and he watched me some more as I pretended to sleep.

  7.

  She was the sun, the moon and the stars, she was the reason he got up in the mornings and what he returned to at night. She was everything that made him believe that life made sense, and if she was the sun around which he revolved, then I was his moon, the cold orb of shadow and transient light, the body that waxed and waned, that didn’t exist in the absence of the sun’s brilliant illumination. She, Catherine, was his brightest being. She gave her light to everything that he did in life, but he stared into that fire for so long that it burned his eyes. He went blind like Galileo, her image and nothing else forever burned onto his retina, and so he could no longer see. But the moon still exists, even when it is silent and obscured by shadow, just a sliver of a celestial fingernail in a blackened sky. I was always there, even when I was not. I was there, waiting, watching, even when my own father could no longer see who I was.

  Catherine loved the sea more than anything, more than him even – perhaps he was the embodiment of that vast and unfathomable water that drew her soul so insistently. But she never thought about how it is the moon that pulls the tides from the sand, the moon that ultimately has the greatest influence on the thing she loved the most. I am done now. I can go. I’ll leave him with his sun, her with her sea. What they haven’t realised yet, is that neither of these can do without me. They are only there because I am.

  A satellite, round and round the earth, the earth around the sun. We formed a geometry together, the three of us – Earth-Moon-Sun. Men have landed upon me and nobody seems to mind. They want to colonise me, but the sun and the earth ignore the repercussions, and they always looked the other way.

  8.

  1972: the year that Catherine was born, and the last time anyone stepped onto the surface of the moon. Look at her directly where she’s stitched upon the sky and you’re in no danger of losing your sight. Eyes drink in a cool beauty. But nobody walks on the sun or desires to, no living thing gets near it except to warm themselves in its far-reaching rays. But the moon is cool, blue. Soft and yielding, something that man can stand upon, build a civilisation on eventually, if he so decides. The sun cannot be colonised, but the moon’s surface is something else. Men of the earth, by its sheer quiet beauty, already believe that they own it.

  Life, fleeting and uncertain, a sudden swim through a continual soup with no surface to break nor freedom to breathe. Times that I might as well have been asleep and curled around my own surface, so close I was to d
reaming, walking through the living breath and the air so green, the sky impenetrable like a slate grey lid above, the prevention from my own escape. Once I took myself to the sea. There was me and Jonker and Plath ahead of me, but there were no poems to speak of that would accompany me in the end, that would walk with me and hold me as I moved into the water, as it was with them. I thought at least in my life I would give birth to something as worthwhile as words, but even my poems were stillborn, even as I turned out to be no great poet. No great poet. No great person. Was I born into who I was to become, or was I made like clay in the soft and manipulative hands of a man? It is hard to stay awake when sleeping holds more promise than the surety of my feet upon the earth. I am alive in clay and dead when the great spirit comes. The chemistry of life creates a kind of drunkenness where clarity of thought is put on hold and the trees wait with arms stretched out in the night for my fate. I who once believed in life am dead to the sun and the spirit of the world and the living, I was not blessed by her, for my sordid benediction came straight from the hands of a man.

  9.

  I bend from the sky and reach all the way down. I touch her hair and she thinks it’s the wind, she straightens it and I lift a strand again and set it awry. Sometimes I feel playful, as though I can toy with her and make her laugh. It happens with those you love. It’s not all heavy and painful, and especially not with sisters. I go to her often to tell her my truth but she thinks that the voice she hears is only inside her own head. And so she brushes me away, dismisses me with a shake of her head, a pull on the sunlit strings of reality. She thinks I am gone but she doesn’t know I am with her always, that I am the greatest strength that she has. Love comes in pockets, seldom consistent or seamlessly creamy like smooth fudge that has not yet set. In truth when we were children she irritated me. I used to think how ugly she was, that she always looked more like a boy than a girl. With adulthood her features have softened, her uneven skin tone smoothed out as her flesh has stretched to cover the larger surface area of her bone structure.