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My Sister Has Been Gone for 20 Years
But I know the day I truly lost her
My sister disappeared on a trip to China. But not like you would think. No lost body. No missing person’s report. She wasn’t even on the trip with my mom and me.
She had, by the time we went, been estranged from us for more than twenty years ever since her wedding, the details of which bore me now — lots of lousiness leading up, an insulting speech by my father, others guilty by association. Mistakes were made. Decisions in the moment and for weeks after, in retrospect, were the wrong ones. I made attempts at contact over the years: phone calls then cards and finally email but some damage can never be undone. And so my sister has been disappearing for years but no matter how much sadness or contemplation, temporary indifference or anger, she never really goes away for good.
There is a game I play when I am bored and find myself in an enclosed space with strangers — an elevator, a bus, at dinner with tourists chatting like shock victims — I pretend these are the last people on earth with whom I can socialize, then I assign them to life’s basic categories: like, love and hate. I was doing just this over dinner at a table with fellow China travelers when the blond, husky German woman across from us, who had already disqualified herself from the categories of like and love…
