echo Lovely Elena. Beautiful Elena. Just Elena—but none of them ever came close to the one I so desperately craved to hear once more. The “Elena” that sounded as soft as cotton candy melting on your tongue and as sweet as the scent of chocolate-chip cookies left on the countertop, still warm, still begging for me to taste it. I had only heard it once. Just once. But it echoed in my heart like a hunger with no cure. The memory of the night she called me by my name for the first and last time played like a broken record in my head.
“Elena.” It was my mother. “Do you know why we named you Elena?”
Streetlights filtered through the gaps in my curtain, casting a golden shimmer on my mother’s soft cheeks and tired eyes. She sat down on my bed, and I cuddled closer, basking in the smell of laundry detergent, the dinner we had earlier, and a whiff of harsh antiseptics and rubbing alcohol.
She tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ears and, in a whisper that was barely audible on top of the undying traffic outside my window, she said, “Elena means a shining light, because you are the light in this part of my life.”
I no longer believed in Santa Claus when I was five; he never did come down the chimney of my house. Instead, my mother made me think that God was the one who made my dreams come true and gave me everything I ever wanted. At a price, of course: we had to pray every night before bed. Until one night, God decided praying and staying loyal weren’t enough. He started to take away things he deemed we were undeserving of. First, it was my favourite scooter, and although I was sad for a few days, I quickly outgrew it. Then he started taking bigger things, like my mother’s car, our house, then finally, my mother’s smile.
And I hated Him for it.
I suppose, when you began primary school, all everyone asked was ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ At first, I thought it was absurd. Who can even see the future anyways? Then, it hit me…just like when Ms. Russo hit me on my head with my pencil case to make me ‘focus’. There was someone who could see the future.
So, when Ms. Russo made us give a presentation on what we want to be when we grow up, I said this:
“When I grow up, I want to be a God.” Everyone laughed, but I kept going, “My mom says only God can save her. She says I’m too little to help, that no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be enough. But if I become like God…then she’ll finally let me.”
That day, I ran back to our tiny apartment. It was nothing like before, but at least we had a shelter over our heads. Taking off my shoes hastily, I ran into the kitchen, excited to show my mom the prize Ms. Russo awarded me for giving the best presentation, but instead of the familiar hunched back over cooking tops, it was empty.
By the time the front door unlocked, it was already way past dinner time. I jumped up from the sofa to welcome her home, but she shushed me with one piercing gaze. She wasn’t alone. My older sister, Rosabella, followed suit. She had sallow skin and could barely hold herself upright. The sour scent of fever clung to her loosely-fitted shirt. Her sunken eyelids glanced in my direction; every blink was a surrender to exhaustion, her chapped lips opened and closed, mouthing something to my mother.
“Come on, Rosabella, let’s get you to bed quickly.” My mother’s voice trembled slightly as she half-carried my sister’s weight across the living room, walking past me, not even sparing a brief look at her other daughter. I sat back down, defeated.
I wasn’t skinny like Rosabella, nor did I have heavy bags under my eyes. My throat didn’t hurt all the time, and I didn’t have to swallow pills like she did. I had perfectly shiny hair, a body fit to run, and a loud voice that pierced through the suffocating silence in this house like a fog that never lifts. Her fragility made me a parasite.
My sister, Rosabella, had all of my mother’s attention. She didn’t have to run from class to grocery stores and pharmacies. She didn’t have to do laundry, clean the toilet, or pack her own lunches to school. She didn’t even have to attend school because of how terribly unwell she was. Of course, it wasn’t that I was unhappy about helping to share my mother’s burdens; it was the fact that Rosabella treated our mother like her personal maid. Every penny my mother earned from juggling three part-time jobs at once was for Rosabella. My mother lived as though every drop of blood bled and all the tears shed were for her. All my mother said now was “Bella, be careful.” “Bella, drink this.” Bella this, Bella that. Never Elena.
Not Elena anymore.
Months drifted by, but every day felt like a year. The house had gone impossibly quieter, and when the afternoon sun tiptoed into the empty living room where I sat, the nasty thoughts started to creep into my mind too. The kind of thoughts that portrayed my sister as a virus that had taken hostage of my mother, the kind of thoughts that I was afraid to even say aloud. And these thoughts were like little pebbles that filled my pockets, only that they grew heavier and heavier until I couldn’t run anymore.
Ms. Russo was the only one who could hear me. Strangely enough, she was the only one who could see that the lights in my eyes had dimmed, the knot in my throat had tightened, and even the pebbles in my pockets. Once, she pulled me aside and told me this:
“Be free from your thoughts, Elena.”
So, I tried running again, because when I ran, all I saw was the track in front of me, and all I heard was the rhythms of my heartbeat. I tried to run as fast as I could, to run faster than the thoughts circulating in my mind. Yet, all I thought about was how heavy the pebbles were in my pockets. I stopped in my path, looking down at my feet, then back at the way I came from. There were no trails of pebbles left behind, and that was when I realised even running or jumping didn’t help shake off the pebbles from my pockets.
Rosabella was rarely out of her room; the only time I did see her was when she was returning from a check-up at the hospital. She never said ‘hi’, never said anything to me, all she ever did was glance at me with disgust on her face as if I were an ugly witch who had cursed her to become this way.
It was 4 pm, Geronimo Stilton played faintly in the background, while I did my homework on the coffee table in the living room. My mother had left for work earlier that day, so it was just me and Rosabella. Bella was in her room, as always, hiding away from everyone else. Yet, deep down, I knew she only wanted to hide from me, because my mother never let me enter her room. I was ‘too healthy’ to enter her room, too strong and steady on my feet to be on the same side as her.
Just this once, I told myself, let her believe I was the enemy infiltrating her base camp. I fired my first shot. Opening the door, I was overwhelmed by the acrid smell of chemicals and disinfectants. Her room was dark, despite the afternoon sun burning outside her windowsill. I took a tentative step closer to where she lay on her bed, as still and motionless as the forgotten Barbie doll in the corner of my room. She wasn’t sleeping… she was dying.
“Elena?” Her voice was so frail and helpless, even the sound of my breathing was louder, “Is that you?”
I didn’t dare answer, fearing my whispers would shatter the stillness of this room. Seeing Bella’s room look so different from mine left me unsure how to feel. It wasn’t filled with roses as I had thought my mother would pamper her with; instead, there were thorns on every corner of her room. Her shelves weren’t stacked with books; it was carrying the weight of a million pill bottles. Her room was clean. She didn’t have toys scattered around her floor or pretty dresses clumsily thrown on her bed. She didn’t have giant Barbie posters on her wall or a makeup table containing friendship bracelets, plastic jewellery, and makeshift handphones. She had nothing to show that she was someone more than a patient.
It wasn’t fear, it was guilt. The guilt that I had even dared to let myself believe that Rosabella was the cost of my happiness. Even as I stood outside her door a while ago, I had blamed her for making this family as miserable as she was just so she could thrive. Yet, how could I ever say that she was sucking the last drop of joy away from this home when there wasn’t even an ounce of happiness in her room. How could I hate her for making me suffer when I was the one who got to enjoy the warmth of the sun on my skin and the sweat forming on my forehead that wasn’t a consequence of a fever, but rather from playing tag with my friends in the playground. She had nothing, and I wanted to take more away from her. Just like that, the little speech I had prepared was left on the other side of her bedroom door.
Instead, I said, “Do you want to play Jenga with me?” As soon as those words came out of my mouth, I realised how stupid I sounded. Of course, she wouldn’t want to play Jenga with me, she had long outgrown that phase.
“Sorry,” I said, suddenly painstakingly aware of how awkward my presence there must’ve been for Bella.
There was a long moment of silence; every second that ticked by felt as though another needle had pierced through my skin. The whirring of the ceiling fan overhead mocked the silence between us.
“Okay, but loser has to grant the winner anything she wants.”
We did play Jenga after all. Bella leaned against her bed as both of us sat cross-legged on the floor. That day was the first time I heard Bella’s voice so clearly, it was so delicate and so light that it reminded me of wind chimes. It was there, light as the wind, but once the wind was gone, her voice was blown away with it as well, covered by a cough.
“I won!” Bella smiled, for the first time after her happiness was taken away by the sickness.
“And for my prize, I want you to get me an ice cream. Also, don’t tell mom.”
“Okie dokie!”
“Bella? Rosabella! Wake up, Rosabella! Please wake up!”
Even in sleep, I couldn’t escape my mother’s cries. Her sobs came like convulsions, each one a wet, desperate gasp for air that never reached her lungs. Her body crumpled as if an invisible hand had wrenched her heart out. Saliva strung between her lips and the floor, her fingers clawing at her collarbone as if she could tear the pain out from its root.
Bella wasn’t moving.
The image of Bella’s lifeless body between my mother’s arms seared a permanent scar on my heart. My mother’s calloused hands clutching my sister’s pale, peaceful face as my mother’s tears stained Bella’s cheeks. The way my mother heaved as if someone had stabbed her through her heart, the way she threw her head back and begged God to help her daughter.
Only I knew that God wasn’t listening.
My hands flew to my mouth, digging my fingers into my cheeks until I felt pain. My breath came out in rough, staggered gasps while my disbelieving eyes burned with hot, unshed tears. I wanted to scream, to run towards them, but every muscle in my body was locked, and my feet were chained to the doorstep of Bella’s room.
“You.” The weight of my mother’s glare formed blisters on my naked skin. “You did this! You killed my Bella!”
At that moment, I wasn’t a God who wanted to share her pain. I was the devil who planted the pain in her. I stumbled backwards, the weight of it all dragging me down to my knees. I could hear the thumping of my heartbeat in my ears while my heart throbbed in my chest, screaming everything my voice could not. The ice cream Bella and I shared just this afternoon turned bitter at the back of my throat. The melted ice cream that dripped onto my palms earlier now stained my hands red.
“I killed Bella.”
I was my own parent for a long, long time. From packing my own sandwiches to school to signing parent agreement forms by myself, I was an orphan living with a mother. I slowly grew up in the empty living room, watching as hours turned to days, then to years until I was ‘old’ enough to know that Bella had worsened to a vegetative state, forever frozen in that night, while I haunted our house.
My mother never looked at me since. She didn’t see how I grew tall enough to reach the top cabinets. She didn’t hear how my voice had deepened and grown softer. She didn’t notice that my face had hardened and my jawline more defined. She didn’t care whether or not I had trouble sleeping ever since.
Yet, every night when the clock struck midnight and the front door opened, I noted her slowly decaying body. How her wrinkles curved around her skin, and how her knees seemed to slow her down day by day. I watched as the last glimmer of light in her life dimmed and extinguished.
I tried running away, but every time I ran, the pebbles in my pockets dragged me back to the doorstep of Bella’s room. Her room stood untouched, like a well-preserved medieval painting. Every stroke of brush painted details with eerie precision, and every time I went back to this painting, new secrets were unveiled. A pill bottle hidden under her bed, small scraps of paper with scribbled-out words thrown away in her dustbin, and a penknife crusted with rust and dried blood.
It was then I realised, it wasn’t pebbles that filled my pockets, it was Bella’s pills all along. From hating the way it weighed me down to getting accustomed to it. And finally, wanting to be freed from it.
It was yet again, 4 pm. The stillness and silence hung thick in the air, making it difficult to breathe. My mother’s aching body rested on the couch.
“Mom?”
Silence.
She didn’t even spare me a look. To her, I was already dead. I was supposed to be, not Rosabella. I stood there for a long time, my suitcase heavy in my hands, my feet planted firmly on the threshold. The living room was silent, save for the ticking of the clock, and my mother’s shallow breath that had grown as familiar as the hum of the refrigerator.
I had always thought that I’d wanted to leave this house. Multiple times, I’d tried to just not come home from school one day. Not that anyone would notice, but it wasn’t this house I wanted to leave behind, it was the weight, the guilt, the anger, and the endless search for something I could never find in this house—love.
I looked around one last time, the window where I spent most of my days simply staring out at the sun, the coffee table where I did my homework, and lastly, at my mother, who always came home but never lived.
Nothing changed, and yet, it felt as though the silence was colder this time. That, even though I had navigated these rooms all my life, I felt like an uninvited guest who didn’t even know where the utensils were kept. It was as though I had always been a guest in this place, where I thought had been my home. I steeled myself, after so many years and even more tears spilled, I realised I no longer need this space to be my home, and I no longer craved to fit in with them. I turned to leave.
“Please take care of yourself, Mom.” With that, I walked out the door.
This time there were no pebbles weighing me down, no promises to keep. It was just me and the world ahead, waiting for me to find my own home. Even though I could never erase the memories of Bella’s suffering and my mother’s pain, I knew I would never have to carry their burdens again.
I didn’t look back.
Written by Yu En
