My sister and I had a very normal relationship for the first 11 years of my life. She was three years older and was absolutely beautiful, everyone she met had to comment on it. She started to rebel in eighth grade and by her freshman year in high school, she regularly ran away. As time went on, she stayed gone longer and longer, my parents had just split up, and my dad would stay out all night looking for her. She ran into the boozing and drug crowd, and found a home with them. it went longer and longer between times that we would see each other since she dropped out of school.

We were always uncommonly close since I was a baby, she was the only one I would take a bottle for apparently. Then, she basically taught me how to talk, and I would follow her around repeating everything after her. Since we grew up in a tiny town we basically just had each other and very few friends. I always had trouble sleeping unless she would come and check on me, and even in sixth grade, I would still leave her a little note says come check on me.…. and she always did. There’s a lot that I didn’t understand about where she went and who she was staying with at the time, but it turns out there was a crowd of grown men who enjoyed hosting drinking parties for high school aged kids and below. Once they were nice and drunk, they would introduce drugs to the girls and sexually abuse them, get them hooked on whatever it was they were pushing and bingo. They had sex slaves essentially. I didn’t know any of that, of course but by the time I was in eighth grade, I rarely if ever saw her, I moved in to her room to sleep in her bed, because it was the only thing that made me feel close to her anymore. I used to leave a note on the window in case she ever came home that said, please come check on me. One night she did she snuck into the house and curled up in bed next to me and spoons me. It felt like a dream come true, I missed her so badly that I didn’t even ask her where she was who she had been with or anything I just hugged her and slept like a rock. By the time I woke up for school, she was already gone. That became a somewhat regular occurrence, at the time I didn’t think it was weird. I just thought it was a good thing because I got to see my sister and be close to her.

Then one night at happened, she had been coming back about once or twice a week for several months and she did the same thing. She came in my bedroom window. It faced away from the road so nobody ever called the police lol. She big spooned me And reached around and rested her hands on my genitals. I won’t get into the gory details, but we started to have mutual sexual relations. I had not been socialized enough to know just how wrong it was, I thought it was just to another layer to that special bond that we had, And I didn’t know it but the feelings I had for were essentially falling in love. I should’ve known better, I was just about old enough but I didn’t and it got to the point where it was enough to sometimes wake up my mom upstairs. She started to bring a Camera, one of those old style ones with like the leather casing on it, and would start to take pictures of our exploits. I kept asking her what she would do with the pictures. She said it was just for her, obviously there’s a lot of dialogue here that I’m gonna skip over, but what I didn’t know was that she was taking the camera back to the crowd of goons, and giving it to them for drugs Because she didn’t wanna have sex with them anymore but she also needed the drugs. I have no idea how to feel about that, and I will never get a chance to ask her why it is she chose me to be that vessel, she could have had any guy on the planet.

When I was in ninth grade, she was out partying all night and got into a car with one of her best friends, they were both very drunk. The car crossed the median on the highway and slammed into a minivan with a family. My sister was the only KIA. There wasn’t enough left of her to have an open casket, so I never saw her after that one last night we had together. I don’t remember ever crying, I think I immediately boxed it up and put it away into a place where I would never ever have to feel the flood of emotion that came. But I do remember leaving a note on the window in my bedroom, or her bedroom really, which said, “Please come check on me”. My mom found the note one day and asked what the hell was going on, but obviously, I never told her. It’s only recently that I started to remember the stuff again, and I think I understand why it was boxed up immediately. I can barely handle it now… back then, I would have been utterly undone.