My name is Daughter. I sit on the left side of the dinner table across Sister — she’s nice to me sometimes, most especially if she needs me to cover for her whenever she wants to come out and play on very late nights. I wish she wouldn’t do that, though. Sitting right next to her is Brother — oh, my wonderful big brother. Always dependable, the one who understood me and my obsession for the color lavender. I woke up one day not understanding why he decided to change his mind about me and my dreams, though. Beside me — or who used to be beside me — is Mother — my feisty Mother. She taught me everything I know in life today. She stood up from the living room couch one night with nothing but the clothes on her back, walked out the door, and never came back. At the center of it all — oh, you know it — is Father. If he would be anything in my life, he’d be my hand-me-down. I have taken to wearing around his hand-me-down silence. I wish I didn’t have to, though. It is a few sizes too big and everyone who could see me would say that it doesn’t fit, that it hangs loose in all the wrong corners.
I always thought I’d grow into it — my happy family is just as normal as yours is. We’re just the same. There is nothing that could possibly go wrong here.
Wrong.
My bathroom mirror blames me for all the unspoken words dropped behind my back, yet it tells me that I look so good and justified at the same time. More than once, I told the mirror it was a liar and like reflex, I smash my fist right into the shards every single time it mocks me. When you dig deep into my pockets right after, you’ll find all the stories my family continues to hand out to the neighbors like candy disguised as car bombs.
On days when everything else is slipping through my fingers, on days when I could still hear my family’s yelling downstairs, I wrap myself inside of this silence. It keeps me warm at night, helps me drift off to sleep, with the assurance that no matter how much I protect myself tonight, my family will still be there when I wake up.
I once begged Mother, “Can you break my head and not my heart?” She would always reply, “I would never hurt you,” yet the bullets I dodged myself from were the ones she fired. When she realized the damage she caused, she told me not to worry — “Mother will fix it.”
Mother and Sister would sew me up, patch the holes, mend the tears, replace a button or two. They will both help me get back up on my feet and tell me how proud they are that they have raised such a strong Daughter, that my hand-me-down silence looks good on me — yet they begin to forget that they needed to protect me from themselves all this time.
Father and Brother once hit me in the head with a stone while we were playing with sticks and stones. The crack in my skull fractured me perfectly like twigs on the branches of our family tree — so I decided to hit them back. This went on and on until we decided to build a wall. Now with each fracture, each tiny break wound itself into a thread — and on the other side of the wall, Father and Brother kept knitting just as fast, too.
So now I’m asking, when the time comes, who is going to be the first to put down the needle and thread?
Who is going to be the first to remember that this family’s daughter suffered just as many broken windows, broken hearts, broken dreams, broken bones as they have?
Who is going to be the first to let go of the shard from my bathroom mirror so that our palms would stop bleeding?
Who is going to be the first to learn that this family of ours should know how to protect our home first before running off to play charades next door?
And when it will be the first time that He’ll come down to dinner, the night that our grown up Son is sitting at the dinner table wearing our problems on his shoulders,
Who is going to be the first to tell him that it is finally time to take it off?
