Lightening

Julia has been telling me to post for a couple weeks now and I keep starting posts and not finishing them. Well here's a finished one. It's funny how easy it is to think of things to write about when you have a stats project due the next day...

Fifteen-year-old girl struck by lightening, the NBC news banner says, killed instantly. The announcer discusses the story with an expected amount of distance--a girl she has never met hit by lightening, probably being ignorant, doing something she shouldn't have, just like every other death she discusses on local news. Within 90 seconds she's moved on to a local car robbery, but I stare at the screen, as if by gazing at it long enough I can pull back the lightening story, maybe even bring back the girl in it. Jenna always wanted to be on TV, I think, how tragically ironic that her time should come in this way. Chance of being struck by lightening? One in 280,000. That's 0.000357%. My statistics teacher, Mr. Moncada, calls numbers like this insignificant-- so small that we don't even bother to mention they exist. Round to zero, because it's basically the same thing. I know better. This is not zero. Chance of getting my sister back? That's zero. Getting struck my lightening cannot be insignificant, statistically or otherwise. It happened, I don't care how unlikely that is to have occurred, and Jenna was anything but insignificant.

How fitting, I think, that she should go like this. A burst of electricity. A shock. Too much energy even for her. It doesn't seem right to wonder, to want to know just how she died, but I do. I wonder if she did a split jump like she always does at home when something really excites her. Always did. Past tense. Did she somehow realize it was coming? Was she even worried about the storm overhead as she walked home from the bus stop in the rain? I doubt it, not Jenna. I'll bet she was dancing in the rain, practicing spins and turns and... maybe not. Maybe I'm already romanticizing the past. Maybe her hips hurt and her feet were blistered the way they always were and she was all too aware of the rain and the cold and she just kept thinking to herself how much it sucked, how much she just wanted to get home, sit by the fire with us... with me...

God, what kind of a self-centered sister am I? Why would she be thinking of me? Maybe she was thinking of the next episode of House, or whether or not to apply to Duke, or that cute guy in chem class... Was Jenna even taking chemistry? Did she have any guys in her life? Any almosts? How much I don't know about the girl I lived with for almost all of my life within memory... And now I'll never know. I'll hear what her friends tell me, maybe I'll know a bit more about her love life or her babysitting jobs, or maybe people will think it's disrespectful to talk about her and won't tell me anything. Maybe everyone else will romanticize the past just like me and all I'll hear are those generic clichés like "she could make the best out of any situation" or "she really put her best effort into all aspects of her life." These are lies. I must remind myself now of the actual truth because five years from now I won't be able to tell right from wrong. Jenna may or may not have been able to make the best of every situation, but she certainly didn't put much effort into doing so. Countless times I've left the house long past dark to go on a late night walk because I'd rather be outside on streets that my mother calls unsafe than inside hearing my mother and sister screaming, hearing them detest each other, watching my family fall apart. Or that one time when I made mom a birthday cake and before we ate it mom and Jenna had such a big argument that she threw my masterpiece at our mother in big, messy chunks of over sweet yellow cake and bright green frosting.

What if I only remember her like that, remember all the times she switched schools because she was intolerant of one or the other, remember her begging for expensive presents and then discarding them within a month, remember her whining and screaming and ignoring and lying and stealing and all those times she told our parents it was me who did it when really it was her? What if in my attempt at honesty, I forget the girl who brought home flowers just to remind us that spring had come? Will I forget her love for design, for art and architecture, how she used to spend hours drawing ideas for dresses and patterns on her binders even when she knew it would come to nothing? Will I forget all the people she was, the gymnast, the excellent student, the dancer, the artist, the model, the photographer, the flirt, the baker, the unforgettable sister? God, I hope she'll live up to that. Unforgettable, I mean. Will I forget how she used to make animal noises when she was stressed, or when she was excited, or just when the house was too quiet? Won't I remember all those school nights when she'd put a romantic comedy into the dvd player and insist that I watch it with her even if we both had tests the next day? Will I remember how some days she'd tell me everything about her life, put off everything else to talk to me, and then half an hour later act like she didn't know me, like I was just in the way? Do I want to remember that? Is it wrong of me to remember only what I want to remember?

And what if I see this five years from now, this random selection of goods and bads and in betweens, and I wonder to myself if she was actually bipolar, if somehow we'd never diagnosed her being actually insane? What if in my memory I exaggerate the past, only remember the extremes, the defining moments, the semi-random photo albums that are supposed to constitute an entire life, and the test scores and accomplishments that can be written down? What if I lose my memories of her, one by one, until some day, sixty years down the road, my granddaughter asks me about my sister and I ask her "what sister?"

Professor Cross was talking about truth in fiction early on... my sister has not been struck by lightening and I don't think she's ever brought home flowers, but you have no idea how much truth is in this story.