One Trouble of Memory

One problem of memory is that it is entirely picked, inexact, and narrative in format. Which is the same thing that makes it so powerful. And in my case, nightmarish. There is a memory that lives in the fibers of what I am (not just who I am, but WHAT I am), one of those that go back to the nerve-center of what has defined me, that bases my thought-in world. It is one of my earliest memories, entirely cogent, thought-through. No doubt, the reason it is so well-worded with memory vocabulary is the number of times I've gone over it, at various ages and in various states, always seeking the details, hoping to flush out some truth from the frustration and loss I felt. Memories are so fluid, so shape-able; they are like lived-in dreams, hard to separate from the emotions we felt, the ideas we thought at the time, or after, that inhabit them, reinhabit them, sometimes the ideas in fact can re-shape them entirely and create fissures - or seal them - in the emotional landscape.
In my case, my memory (not surprisingly) is of my sister, and the day I decided to kill her.
It is surprising, due to the fact that I have had to say so many times as an adult that I had no wish to kill her (and certainly then I did not), that I have ever wished her dead. But there was a moment, in fact two distinct moments I remember, where I very much wished her dead and gone, dead by my hand, a knife plunged in her by ME. And I wanted her to know it was ME.
Why, and how, could I have possibly wanted such a thing?! And at the tender age of four or five?

My sister is three and a half years older than me. When I arrived, she was already an almost hyperactive and extremely stubborn three and a half year old. She told me later her penchant for talking was something she had always had; even at that age she was terrified and confused by our older siblings calling her a 'jabberwokee' something she associated with nightmares. Already, it seemed, her difference, and her fear of that difference, had arisen in our family through the painfully frank observations and reactions of little children.

By the time I reached the age of three, I was almost fully cognizant of my world. I remember breaking my tibia, the emotions of anger at me for doing so; I remember being dressed up by Tavia and then posed like a doll, told 'not to complain' and feeling awful about it. I remember the fights over me when both my sisters wanted to dress me up, and feeling frightened to choose the older over the younger, for fear of the younger's inevitable reaction, tantrum, and her almost certain desire to take it out on my later. I remember being bored of movies my parents were watching, and going to find my mothers high heels so that I could try them on.

So when I was four-ish (I assume this through some archaeology of memory, which is of course shifting. She couldn't have been 11 because she was not yet terribly depressed, I was not three, because my leg had healed), there came a great moment of shift for us, for me, our relationship.
Always a frightening one, honestly, things came to a head when she proposed we wrestle.

Tavia liked to wrestle, and she was tall and strong. So strong! She was a fighter and stubborn, extremely good at tactics, especially physical ones. I did not have these traits or any desire to learn them. My life was filled with wanting to read, dancing, singing, helping with chores, taking naps, uncertainty over kindergarten, going into my mother's closet and standing between the layers of her hanging clothes, smelling the scent of clean fabric and Ysatis.
I said no.

She taunted me with this. She was bored, I was there, no doubt it seemed logical that she should try to 'get' me to wrestle. But she told me I had to. I said I did not. She told me if I didn't, she'd already won, and I had to do what she wanted, say what she wanted. I was a coward. Any number of horrible things (no doubt). In any case, I said yes, and I was very unhappy about it... but maybe also (I remember vaguely) a little bit hopeful that somehow, someway, I could win. Somehow maybe I could beat her and she would respect me and that would be fun! It would be so fun to finally be told that I could actually do something right.

She beat me. That was not surprising. But she beat me and she made me say it before she would get off me. And so I would say it, and that would be that. But then it got worse, and worse. I'd have to say other things, too. Things like "You won, and I lost" but then also "You're smart and I'm stupid" or she'd say put other definitions on win and lose so they really meant good/bad, able/incapable, or other horrible dichotomies. And she liked to taunt me when she was sitting on me, as I refused to give up, as I got angrier and angrier. I remember that she was enjoying it, and I remember that it was hurting me. And I remember also that when I finally flatly refused to say she had won, or whatever else it was she wanted, she ground her hands down on my wrists so that the circulation was stopping and she sat down on me hard so that I couldn't breathe. I stuck to my guns, but it was obvious I was going to suffocate, so eventually I gave up. Kind of. That was it. It was one of those times. I don't remember how many times we wrestled at night, I just remember the snapping point. And she got off me, and I leapt off the bed (because we shared a huge queen bed, huge for two little girls, anyways), and I stood there and I pent up my anger into a ball, a huge fire ball and I screamed at her "Fuck you!" "FUCK you!!!" I yelled, and she looked at me, shocked, and then said "I'm going to tell Mom and Dad you said that."

That was it. It was the unfairness. I knew at that age my parents would take her side - they would say I had gotten myself into the wrestling match, that Tavia had done nothing wrong, and I would be spanked for saying that word. The emotional depth of it all was breathtaking. She had taken away my very belief in myself, she had forced me to call myself a failure and admit I was never going to be the person I wanted to be. She had waxed long (long to a four-year-old) about what all this meant, how stupid this made me. And I was going to be spanked. I'd been shamed, I would be punished. It was unjust and it was killing me. So I would kill her.

I ran to the kitchen. I pulled the chair to the counter, I climbed up to it, I got the knife down. I got down off the counter (we weren't allowed to get on the counter). I held the knife in my hand. It was big. I'd gotten the bigger knife. I thought. I thought a lot. COULD I do it? I wanted to do it, my blood boiled, literally, I was SO angry, I was SO hurt and I knew, absolutely and incontrovertably that if I did not do it, I would be closeted with this same person taunting me, holding my failures over my head, telling me, proving to me I never would be what I wanted to be, for another 12 years at least. I had to end it. I could not go on. It was time for a decision, because obviously it was me or her. And I chose myself. For a second. I would kill her. I would stab her very hard, and she would die. And the family would be torn apart, because I would go to jail, or juvenile hall or something, and eventually be executed, and my family would go through all of that. And they would miss her. I couldn't do it. I was terrible for thinking it. But I couldn't live with her, it was worse than death. I couldn't go back to the room and apologize and beg her not to say anything. I couldn't! I decided to kill myself at that moment. How did they do it in the movies?

The idea of wrist slitting had not been come across by that age. I held the knife to my breast. I would have to push it really hard. Really hard. Between my ribs, maybe? I couldn't. I imagined the pain, but also how my family would feel. They wouldn't understand, they'd be heartbroken, they wouldn't get that it was happier for me to go now. They would be so devastated, at my funeral, crying... the mourning wouldn't end for years and years, they would have to live with it. I would go to heaven, and just leave them, and they would have to suffer. It was too selfish. I watched my hope of myself, the self I wanted to be, walk away from me down the hallway, a slim, lithe and happy figure, tall and self-assured, they walked down the stairs into the hallway and disappeared from me. I put the knife back, my hands shaking. No one could see me holding it. I had hoped for a wild moment someone would see me with it to my chest, they would cry out "no!" and take it away. But if I told anyone, really, I'd just be punished I thought. I put it back quickly. I walked away.

It happened a second time, the same decision, same thought process.

The third time, I realized something had to be done. I took the knife with me to the room and told Tavia I had it, told her I wouldn't say those things anymore, that she should be careful because I might always have a knife. She laughed, said it was against the rules. As if that somehow trumped everything. I wilted. The wrestling stopped but I never came back to myself. The figure that disappeared down the hall never returned.

They say that rapists put their shame on others. I think that that may have been what happened at that moment. I think she was trying to put her shame and hurt and discomfort with the world on me. She felt rejected, a misfit, shameful. She had to take it out on someone else, and I happened to be there. Who knows. My narrative memory ends there, but the reality of it all continued for a long time.