good girls

The good girl gets praise. The good girl gets smiles and winks and a treat occasionally like a favoured dog. There is no courage involved being good. No daring deeds, no ethical dilemmas. A good girl follows orders and does so quietly without much fuss. A good girl puts others needs ahead of her own, takes the smallest slice of cake, praises others habitually. A good girl does not need time to make decisions because the best course of action is clear to her from the start, laid out by the family. Yellow brick road of one good deed after another.

It is harder to be the bad girl. It is harder to think for yourself and question what you are told. It takes strength and vigilance and yes, it is exhausting to make every new action a moral decision. The bad girl expends energy on her silent rages. The bad girl grows dark circles under her eyes and deep indentations in her forehead. The bad girl must stand tall against the judgement of the world. The bad girl must have self confidence and commitment.

You are only the bad girl in relation to me. All my struggles towards goodness mark you. I am to blame. Still I make myself more and more good. So good that I can no longer carry the weight of my good deeds. The cracks are showing. I draw the weapon in my brain. I see it's metalic cylinders. I see the bullet that will slip so speedily through one barell or another. I put the imaginary thing to my own forehead. Would a good girl do this? Or would this good girl find some random stranger, let the wound spring of her saintliness snap whilst aimed at someone else. Would the good girl jump into the river where her sin will be washed clean by deep dark? How will this good girl relinquish her mantel. And when she is gone, will you, my sister, be free to take on some goodness of your own?

Elvish

She learns how to speak Elvish. She has read me The Hobbit and we have moved on to the Lord of the rings. It is true there is a wonderful secret pleasure in knowing a language that only exists in books. A language shared between the two of us and barely anyone else in the world. I am slow to learn. My tongue is thick and I do not have the focus to understand the grammar. Our grandmother knows three languages to speak and several more to read or understand. When I tell this to Karen her mouth hardens to a pencil line of condescension. Even if our grandmother knows twenty languages she is not invited to share in our Elvish. This is something for my sister and I alone.

She grows impatient with me. We come back to the lesson each day after school but instead of learning more words I seem to forget a new one every day. The lessons are for her and I am there to watch her learning. I know this, and so I nod when she tells me I am slow. She sets up a Special School in the corner of the yard and instead of Elvish my task now is to tie and re-tie my shoe while I listen to her recite poetry in a language that I have not yet mastered. I am obedient. Still there is a vague unsettled feeling itching under my skin. I know how to tie my shoes and yet I fumble it, miss one eyelet or another leave the laces too loose and let them fall apart under her inspection. She punishes me, and her punishments make her bad and in comparison I am good.
There are numerous examples of good girls patiently waiting for their rewards. I think of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. Various assorted princesses each one suffering under pressure from evil step mothers, horrible husbands, ugly sisters. The harsher the punishment, the more virtuous I become. At school I am the most obedient of students. I know the answers to questions, I am always first to put up my hand to help the teacher. My sister takes her rage and channels it into evil deeds. She sits in the schoolyard with the malcontents. She is sent to the office once or twice a week. She is surly at dinner, and, afterward when we settle to work on the models together, she sits with her back to us, preferring the company of a book to our stories on reel to reel. We have chosen our sides. She is the bad child. I am the good. We stick to our separate territories and we excel in our polarised roles. Still each afternoon we play the game. I fail the small domestic task that she has set for me. She dishes out new punishments, holding a stone outstretched on the palm of my hand till my arm starts to burn and my muscles cramp, writing out lines in a notebook, I must do better next time, I must do better next time.

We have an alliance. Like all good prisoners and their captives there is a certain care between us. I give myself up to her slow kind of torture and she allows herself to become beastly in her treatment of me. For a while we are close. An equilibrium.

When the family ask her about school she just shrugs. Volunteering nothing. When I am alone with our mother in the kitchen, she puts her arm on the top of my head and draws me closer to her.

“Is Karen okay?”

“I think so.”

“She talks to you about things?”

“Not really.”

“But nothing is wrong? At school? Or anything?”

“No. Everything is good.”

I am blessed with secret knowledge, the hidden moods of my sister are mine to keep to myself or to divulge.

committment to sister

Now is the time for me to commit to this. I remember the sluggish pace of the last book, all good intentions until I forced myself to creep forward publicly each day. Today is the day of my commitment. Sister stuff one day at a time. A slow creep over into real work, headway. Maybe it will get this book written as the last one was written, suddenly, by accident. One tiny sister step forward and revelations revealing themselves at 2am.

This tiny committed step brings you and eye ever closer, my manuscript, my sister, the mirror to myself.

Lifted brow

Four new vagina posts have been and will be featuring on the Lifted Brow Tumblr

here
http://theliftedbrow.tumblr.com/

body

The way we feel is of the body. Bodily. We take the information in and turn it into some physical affliction. Disappointment becomes flu. Guilt becomes cancer. Anger is a migraine churning the bile in our stomachs. The things we have said to each other heat our flesh till one day we spontaneously combust. The stigmata of the things you said to me dripping fluids from the palm of my hands. And we, sisters, who were once conjoined walk free in the world with the raw flesh of our separation still weeping.

Guilt

I will never outrun it. It marks the distance between us, and each year this gulf widens. I stand at my side and I peer across and I am reminded of how you drew a line across the middle of our floor. My side and yours. and the distance between you and me impassable. What began in childhood is now thick and heavy and scarred over.

Mostly I forget about you and you forget about me and there is this scab of distance between us. Nice. So long as nothing smashes into the wound, like guilt, the hammer, thumping the wound till it splits and bleeds all over the place.

Hardest

My friend needs to be brave enough to write the hardest thing. We can edge around it making craft, we can potter in the shallows making pretty pictures with our words and the ideas will be fine, good enough. But the hardest thing is where we struggle. The harder we struggle the better it will be.

I have settled on my own hard thing and although it hurts to write it, it will be rewarding. Throw yourself into the deep end and if you swim it will be strong and fast and the kind of life-saving swimming that makes a good spectator sport.

I know you don't want to write it, but just do it. Now or in ten years or later still. You will have to come back to this eventually. Do it now while I am standing at your side promising that I will not let you fall.