Unwriting My Sister as a Teddy Bear

I’ve behaved poorly every winter I can remember, my awfulness in each separated only by degrees, secrets piled like snowdrifts at the corners of rooms I wouldn’t stay in. Hiding was easier. I stuffed myself in the closet of our pit-city apartment— walls infested with neighbors tiptoeing through roach powder caked like salt-circle prayers— my sister above me, her small body throwing up what little warmth our family offered—a recipe of lemons and gelled mentholyptus to keep us quiet. Her vomit running from the top bunk down to me smelled warm and too green. I had to get out of there. I disappeared because the air outside was too full of breaking— vows shattering; locks snapping too loud for lungs that barely held. The familiar sound of domestic violence brings a comfort of knowing what’s next. Embracing the facts early and often can help you put at least the length of a teddy bear’s arm between its sound and yourself. Later, these winters of paying the cold forward, before it reached me, translated: stealing partners, and partners’ passwords, eating nine boxes of pizza rolls to swallow my sexuality, never finding the end of a bottle, arguing against the brittle logic of my own survival— because proving I mattered felt better than knowing I might not. But let me rewrite these winters: I pull my sister from the bunk, our laughter is what breaks open the dark, we are cherry blossoms bursting through an imminent thaw, we lie in peace across our bedroom sheets, left to mature in a natural sun. We remake the closet into a fort, walls drawn tighter not to trap us but to keep us safe. My sister’s eyes aren’t buttons anymore, she isn’t puking synthetic cotton, I don’t use her small body as armor. Outside, the snowlight waits, soft as her hand in mine. We step into the cold and make it ours, reaching for the frostbitten branches and claiming them as swords. No harsh realities or words can follow here— and if they try, we let them land, then split their heads like seeds in the muck, each fracturing skull a shot at a promise of something that finally grows.