On "broken" families | A prose poem based on true events

ᴾʰᵒᵗᵒ ᵉᵈⁱᵗᵉᵈ ⁱⁿ ᶜᵃⁿᵛᵃ

There was a knot of hair at the back of my younger sister’s head. We were headed to the tailor for a gown repair and I couldn’t let her look so beautiful in a black sequined dress with nested hair spun like a deceased spider. So I combed it out with my fingers and when she noticed what I was doing, stopped walking. As I untangle the knots one by one, I remembered meeting my sister when she was a little crescent moon-eyed kid, her hair undone and blouse untucked from her skirt, strands of hair pasted in squiggly lines on her face, playing at our school playground. I would catch her running embrace and brush her hair neatly in a ponytail and iron out her blouse into the skirt.

Outside our home of bleach-dipped fingers and tightly sealed lips, we took care of each other and kept the child-like fun alive in our souls. It was the only human thing to do, to laugh, and to cry together. If I had skipped buying snacks from the canteen during recess, I would tell my sister I was the richest student, proclaiming I could buy her anything she wanted. We’d rattle our minds with calculations of the best possible snack combo we could get for two. Five candies, two each and a half-bitten one? 2 bubble gums and 1 choco stick? On my luckiest starving day, I would buy us 2 full-size potato crisps with a large iced tea to share. Years passed, and I’m still honoring our sacred pact of sharing my change for afternoon snacks. The only difference is, I have a job that pays for full-course meals instead of pica-picas.

From the beginning, we were a broken family. Neither divorced nor separated, my parents were forced to “make it work” and tried their very best, but the smell of bleach eventually became too suffocating, words you could never clean were spilled on the floor, and my siblings and I scrubbed our nail beds dry. We are the cursed kids, the cause of the cracks, they said. A colorless strong stench lingered, but all the adults pointed at us. Our early days taught us to keep quiet so in silence, we watched the brokenness unravel. At first, it looked like losing meals at the dinner table and then losing the sense of parents in the mornings. The only human thing to do is to makeshift a family. So I walked with my younger sister to the tailor's shop and watched lovingly as she wore a long gown with no sleeves, no knots in her hair, and a meal waiting after her fitting.