Trinity

Mother said she liked Emma best. Emma was the nice one. The one gifted with manners that could make a monarchy jealous— with a voice so sweet, it could draw in the bees. I told her Emma was the sort of girl who skipped in fields of barley, and lay beneath the sun’s rays until it rained. Then dance for a while, until she arrived home with her dress sheer, and sticking to her skin. 

In secret, I envied her. She was everything I was not. While she was full of life, I was miserable in mine. Where she saw colours, I saw grey. I wished I could consume, even a small amount of, her energy and zest for life.

There were three of us. Emma was the eldest—the fiery and passionate one. Joe was the second. Then there was me.

Joe was a mystery. Mother said Joe was born silent. I think she had wanted to say scary, but I sensed her hesitation.

“How am I afraid of my own child?”, she had once cried to herself, as I sat huddled in the corner and prayed the ground would swallow me. I knew he had crept up on her one night while she was sleeping. She awoke to find him standing there, his face like stone. She remembered the object in his hand—shaking. What she remembered the most was the look in his eye, dangerous and unyielding. She didn’t leave her bed when he was hospitalised for six months, afterwards. I, on the other hand, visited him many times. The hospital was filled with people who looked like they would welcome death at any moment. It sent a shiver down my spine that still hadn’t completely gone away. 

I was the character who stayed in the shadows. Most of my time was spent in my room, making art that nobody else understood and writing things nobody else saw. I felt like time was tedious— and that I was just waiting for something, anything to happen. I craved an excitement that would dredge me out of this dull existence. I wondered many times why my mother had decided to keep me. 

My father had unleashed the angst he had been hiding for twenty years— just before he slammed the door shut, never to be seen by any of us again.

“I wish we’d gotten rid of you when we could!” I heard the poison tinged with regret in his voice.

After that, I wished I wasn’t welcomed into this world too. 

The only memories I had of him were vague, and yet I remember my feelings vividly. I recalled his bedtime stories. How he would crawl into my bed and tell me a story until I felt drowsy. After that my memory seemed to fail me. I don’t think I missed him. It felt like he had died a long time before he left us.

When I went to see my shrink, he asked me what I thought of myself. I said I didn’t. I thought of everybody else, and what I would do if I had the life of a stranger. I would travel the world, I told him. I would be lovable, like Emma. I saw him gaze at me—lowering his glasses so that they were perched on the bridge of his nose—and then scribble something down in his leather-bound notebook. He was judging me. I knew he was.

I think everybody did. At college, I always felt hundreds of eyes on me as I walked past them—boring into my head, as if they knew what was going on in it. I saw swarms of bodies rushing to their destination, completely unaware of my entity.

One morning I woke to the throbbing of my head, and blood in my bed. The gashes in my arms weren’t too deep, but they were deep enough to stain my sheets through. I knew it had been Joe. It had to be Joe. 

Mother had called an ambulance and I was rushed into hospital to get fixed up. She wouldn’t stop sobbing all the way there. The rest of the day was a blur for me—travelling in and out of a lucid sleep. It must have been the the drugs.

The cops came in to my room, at one point. I was barely awake, but I answered any questions they had. Mother insisted I was tired, but I wanted to get this part over with. They usually asked the same questions.

How are you feeling? Can you tell me what you remember?

I always told them the same thing. I didn’t remember anything. 

The next thing I saw was a different room, with the same white walls and white ceilings that blinded you when you looked at them too directly. A sense of dèjà vu enveloped me, a nagging thought in the back of my head that wouldn’t come to the surface. 

A woman, with a face I wouldn’t remember—sat in the chair beside my bed and proceeded to click her pen a number of times, before speaking.

She introduced herself as Doctor something-or-other, and mentioned that she would be happy to answer any questions I had. She asked about home—about my family, and friends. I mentioned Emma and Joe. How they were the only people I was close to. 

The lady narrowed her eyes, creasing her forehead like old newspaper. Her smile was one that was meant to be reassuring, but unnerved me. 

She said that Emma and Joe were two parts of me. That we weren’t an ‘Us.’ We were ‘Me.’

She kept talking—to fill the silence, I suppose.

Her voice drowned out. I turned my head and saw a face in front of me. With washed out skin like worn out clothing, and grey circles surrounding dark eyes. A realisation dawned on this reflection. 

It was me. 

And for the first time in a while, it smiled.