Dear Tori

Yesterday was St. Patrick's Day! I met Lisa for lunch (did you know she's moving to Connecticut?  She got an internship with YALE MEDICAL, holy cow. She took a gigantic train for seventeen hours all the way up, yuck.) and then my old roommate, Megan came to visit with her fiance, Devon. She asked about you a lot, and she liked your haircut when I showed her a picture. I was wondering what you did on St. Patrick's Day? I know you had that shirt that mom sent you, with the shamrocks on it, so I wondered if they threw you a little party in there. If there were cupcakes and green streamers. Or maybe it was a normal Saturday, which is not a day that any of us come to visit you, so I don't know what you were doing. That's strange.

I have this thing I do when I'm worried about something. I try to imagine the very worst possible outcome of the situation if everything goes wrong. Within reason of course; I stop pretty far short of things that end in "and then the world blows up." But what happens is that I usually find that the outcome isn't as terrifying as I'm pretending it is. "Oh, this paper isn't looking like it's getting done on time? Well I suppose I'll get marked down and get maybe a B or a C on this one paper. Or if I fail the whole entire class, I'll maybe have to re-do this semester next year or something. That would be the pits, but in the grand scheme of things, would I make it through? Yes. Would life as I know it be over? No." That's how it usually goes, but it doesn't work when I get worried about you.

(Here, I'd like you to know that some drunk girl outside my window just yelled "she's a fucking whore!" at her boyfriend. Ohhhh, downtown living. Two more months. Did I tell you that I'm not renewing my lease? I'm going to have a quiet and old apartment where Maggie will have space and peace.)

The answers to the "what are the worst possible outcomes?" question when I get worried about you are just too scary. It's so morbid, but people keep telling us to get geared up to say goodbye to you. Can someone really do that? Prepare to tell their baby sister goodbye and let them fade into obscurity? Sometimes, if I'm having a really bad day, I think about what I would say if I had to go to your funeral in a few years. What would I tell people? How would I explain that I picture my sister as the golden and adventurous heart that I know her to be, surrounded by a brittle, black encasement that she can't shake free? I would have to tell people that, even though we were determined to reclaim my little sister, we failed. It makes my heart hurt.

The other day, you jokingly told me that you better be included in my wedding one day, and I told you that it was a given, because having a sister is having a built-in Maid of Honor. I didn't tell you that I was sort of begging you to still be around that day, far in the future. I don't care if you still have a silly Justin Beiber hair cut (but I'm allowed to poke fun at you flipping your head around all the time), and I love you no matter who you love, but I just want to know that you're going to try, too, because I miss you every second of every day. I want to be visiting you in your first apartment one day, not this place where you're not allowed to walk too close to the locked exit doors.

I want you to come swimming with me in the Fort George River at night when the phosphorescent bacteria things light up when you swish the water, because you're the only one who will get in with me when it's dark. I want to play Taboo because I love when you switch up words when the timer is running down. I think you're a great dancer. I remember how much you've always loved babies; once, you told me you wanted have 19 of them. I remember when you tried to follow me into the woods when we were camping and you scratched your little legs horribly on some barbed wire that I had stepped over. You balled your fists and shook them back and forth but you didn't cry. You didn't even cry when you fell off your bike and broke your collar bone. (Until we told you it was broken, that is.) I remember how you used to pile your stuffed animals on the bed and sleep underneath all of them... and the dog.

I wish I knew what happened to you. If I knew someone had hurt you at all, I would tear them to pieces. Do you remember when Sarah Trainer, my friend next door, pushed you off the swing, or called you a name, or something like that? When you came home crying, I went storming up to that little "secret garden" place between our yards determined to get into the first fight of my eleven or twelve years of existence.

But I may not ever get the chance to see whoever it was that broke you; it may not even be that concrete of an idea (and the words "moral" and "ethical" are also floating around in my head... whatever. The phrase "justifiable homicide" is in there, too, is that even a thing?"). So the biggest way I can take a little bit of revenge is to keep hanging on to you. Not let you be taken away. I will always hold your hand, and love you at your core no matter what else is going on. But I won't think about your funeral anymore, I will think about a funeral we can have for a really scary time in our lives, a story of the dark things we faced together. And then we can have a birthday for my brave, strong, funny little sister, who didn't let it take her down with it.