“She asked us to give you this,” he added.
I took it from him more forcefully than necessary, my fingers already tearing it open before my mind had caught up with what I was doing. The handwriting hit me first. I hadn’t seen it in years, but I would have recognized it anywhere—slanted slightly to the right, uneven in places, like she always wrote too fast for her own thoughts.
The first line made my chest tighten.
By the time I reached the middle of the page, I couldn’t breathe.
My sister—her name was Clara, though I had spent so long refusing to say it out loud that it felt unfamiliar even in my own head—had not been “finding herself,” as I had so dismissively told people when they asked where she’d gone. She had been unraveling. Quietly, steadily, and completely alone.
The pressure, she wrote, had been too much. The expectations, the comparisons, the constant sense that she was falling short of something she couldn’t even define—it had all built up until there was nothing left inside her that resembled the person I thought I knew. She left because staying would have broken her entirely.
